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LOOKING AT LIFE; 



OE, 



THOUGHTS AND THINGS. 



BY 



GEORGE AUGUSTUS SAL A, 

AUTHOR OF "TWICE ROUND THE CLOCK," "GASLIGHT AND DAYLIGHT, 
" A JOURNEY DUE NORTH," ETC. ETC. 






LONDON : ^ 
EOTJTLEDGE, WAENE, AND KOTJTLEDGKE, 

FARKINGDON" STKEET. 

NEW YORK : 56, WALKER STREET. 

1860. 






LONDON : 
BRADBURY AND EVANS, PRINTERS, WHITEFRIARS. 






ADTEETISEMENT. 

The Papers comprised in the present Yolume appeared 
originally in the pages of Household Words, at various 
intervals, between the close of 1851 and the early part of 
the year 1856 ; and they are now reprinted, in a collected 
form, with the sanction of Mr. Charles Dickens, the 
proprietor of that publication. 



„ 



PONTENTS. 

PAGE 

MONSIEUR GOGO'S 1 

CITIES IN PLAIN CLOTHE3 12 

MINE INN 25 

SLANG 31- 

ALWAYS UNITED 44 

LIBERTY, EQUALITY, FRATERNITY, AND MUSKETRY 55 

DOORS 69 

FOUR STORIES 80 

THE GREAT HOTEL QUESTION (iN FOUR CHAPTERS) : • 

CHAPTER I. FRENCH AND SWISS HOTELS . . . . 95 

„ II. GERMAN HOTELS 109 

„ HI. ITALIAN AND AMERICAN HOTELS . . . 119 

„ IV. ENGLISH HOTELS 134 

THE PRESENT MOMENT 147 

A PEEP AT DUBLIN ; ALL ALONG THE QUAY ... .153 

AN IRISH STEW; ANOTHER PEEP AT DUBLIN . . .' . . 163 

A GOOD CHAMPION; OR, THE LITTLE BLUE MANTLE . . . . 172 

SUNDAY MORNING 179 

SUNDAY OUT 187 

SUNDAY MUSIC .... 198 

UNDAY TEA-GARDENS .... 208 



vi CONTENTS. 

PAGE 

second-hand sovereigns 216 

time and the hour 228 

my man. a sum. 234 

philip stubbes; or, vanity fair in the olden time . . . 243 

queen mabj a case of real distress 265 

the old magician; another case of real distress . . . 273 

numbers of people: counted and sifted in 1s51 . . . 2s9 

a dead secret 305 

ten minutes " cross-country " 328 

the dalgetty race 333 

mars a la mode 345 

county guy 352 

shops • - . . . . 356 

the great invasion ' 366 

YADACE 377 

POOR ANGELICA 387 

OPEN-AIR ENTERTAINMENTS 401 

THE FACULTY 412 

A HANDFUL OF FOREIGN MONEY 426 

ROGER THE MONK 436 

LILE JACK : 

CHAPTER I. THE DODDERHAM WORTHY. . ... . 447 

II. THE COMPASSIONATE BROKER . . . . 454 

BULLFROG. . , 465 



LOOKING AT LIFE; 

OR, 

THOUGHTS AND THINGS, 



MONSIEUR GOGO'S. 



Theue is, in the famous city of Paris, between the Champs 
Elysees and the Park of Monceaux, a street called the Rue 
Miresmonisl. When we were novices in the Trivia, or art of 
walking the streets, of Paris, and consequently erred like lost 
sheep therein, this Miresmonisl was to us a harbinger of a 
discovered territory ; for when we found it, we found a clue 
to the intricate maze of thoroughfares we were threading. 
Miresmonisl, or as, in the innocence of our hearts and our 
then imperfect French, we were wont to call it, Mirrlymonizzle, 
led, or seemed to lead, to every place of note in Paris. It 
adjoined the Tuileries ; it was hard by St. Honore ; it was 
over-against the Boulevards ; it was the way into town, and 
out of town. It led into the Rue de la Pepiniere ; it con- 
ducted the wayfarer into the Rue de Courcelles, where, stand- 
ing half-way between one of the slaughter-houses, the Abattoir 
du Roule, and the hotel whilom occupied by Queen Maria 
Christina of Spain, was an establishment with which we have 
at present more particularly to do. This was the Pension 
Gogo. We were brought up by M. Gogo. 

We were for a long time brought up there. In considera- 
tion of a sum of one thousand francs, paid quarterly, we were 
instructed in the usual branches of a polite education — 
boarded, lodged, and washed. Moreover, the Pension Gogo 



2 MONSIEUR GOGO S. 

was a school of ease — a succursale, as it is called, to the 
College Bourbon, now Lycee Bonaparte, which did not receive 
boarders ; and from the Pension to the College we were daily 
conducted (when sufficiently advanced in our humanities to 
profit by the collegiate course of instruction), returning to our 
meals at stated periods. 

The prospectus of the establishment (printed on superfine 
paper, with gilt edges) stated it to be situated "in the midst 
of vast gardens and orchards filled with the most delicious 
fruit." We confess that the vastness of the gardens and the 
deliciousness of the fruit were of no very special benefit to us 
boys ; for they both belonged to as ill-tempered a market- 
gardener as ever wore a straw hat and carried a scarlet ging- 
ham umbrella, and who let loose fierce mastiffs at us when 
we were bold enough to scale his wall to recover lost balls or 
shuttlecocks, who maliciously whitewashed his peaches and 
nectarines, in order to render them nauseous to our taste, 
after we had been at the trouble of stealing them, and who 
was notoriously suspected, and was, we verily believe, guilty, 
of the cold-blooded and cowardly ferocity of placing large 
cat's-head apples and juicy jargonelle pears as decoy ducks 
within our reach, which were filled with jalap and tartar 
emetic. " The house, or rather the chateau," (the prospectus 
went on to say) " covered a large extent of territory, and was 
adjoined by beautiful pleasure-grounds." In good sooth, it 
was a spacious range of buildings, (for we had fifty boarders, 
or internes, and upwards of a hundred externes, or day-boys, 
to accommodate,) arranged round a good- sized gravelled square 
or play-ground ; one side of the quadrangle being formed by 
the master's house ; the side opposite him by the boundary- 
wall, separating us from the morose market-gardener, and the 
two lateral ones by the school-rooms and dormitories of the 
boys. 

Straight, as we write, rises up before us portly, bass-voiced, 
important, and inflexible (though dead and cold these half- 
dozen years), the master — directeur, he was called — of the 
pension, M. Napoleon Gogo. Large was he in person, black 
of hair, whiskerless of countenance, stern of mien. He wore 
shoes, and was addicted to strongly perfumed snuff. He never 
taught us anything himself ; but would come in while we were 



MONSIEUR GOGO S. 3 

droning over our lessons, and listen, with his head cocked a 
little on one side, and with his fat finger gently scratching one 
ear, as though he knew all that had been said, and even all 
that was coining. We thought him a monument of learning, 
wisdom, and wit ; but we have grown sceptical on that subject 
now, and are very much afraid that we should not be unjust 
to him if we were to say that he was a good-natured, decently 
intelligent, but somewhat illiterate man (striving, however, to 
get the best masters for his boys and to do his duty by them 
generally). He reprimanded us occasionally in a loud sonor- 
ous voice, pulling our ears and rapping our knuckles ; but he 
never beat us without a cause, nor starved us, nor cheated us ; 
and the remembrance we have of him now, has more of love 
and of regret about it than of the fear, and horror, and disgust 
with which the bare recollection of a schoolmaster inspires us 
sometimes. 

M. Gogo was married : his wife was a large, vulgar, tender- 
hearted, industrious, Normandy matron, who physicked, 
scolded, petted, and took care of the boys indefatigably. 
Though her husband was rich, she had not the slightest pride, 
were it not that, indeed, of owning that her parents were 
small cultivators — peasants, in fact — near Caen. Twice a- 
year these good people used to pay her a visit : the father, a 
grey-haired, apple-faced agriculturist, in a cap with a green 
shade, gold ear-rings, an elaborately embroidered blouse, and 
sabots; the mother, a regular " bonne femme de Normandie" 
in coarse-ribbed worsted stockings, a lace apron, a Normandy 
cap, or cauclioise, of astonishing loftiness, and bearing the 
never-failing umbrella. The days for coming were the Jour 
de Van, when M. Gogo invariably presented his father-in-law 
with a loaf of white sugar; and Madame Gogo's fete day, on 
which occasion the old lady never failed to bring her daughter 
her patron saint in gilt gingerbread. The head of the Pen- 
sion Gogo had also a daughter — a comely maiden, with whom 
we were all, of course, desperately in love ; but who, to our 
great grief, became a Sceur de Charite. Also, he had a son, a 
brown-faced little ragamuffin, called Desire, but generally 
known by the name of "Lily," on the lucus a non lucendo 
principle, we suppose. We used to admire with fond fear the 
Spartan impartiality of M. Gogo, in pulling Lily's ears, 

b 2 



4 MONSIEUR GOGO S. 

placing him on a bread-and-water diet, and causing him to 
stand in the corner whenever he had rendered himself liable 
to those penal inflictions. 

We had three resident masters of the three different classes 
of the school, and a classical master, who saw that the boys 
got up their college exercises, and attended to them generally. 
M. Thenard was the master of the first class. We remember 
him well : incorrigibly snuffy, inconceivably dirty, prodigi- 
ously learned. He positively eat books — grasped them 
fiercely — knawed at their leaves and covers — wrenched the 
learning from them, as it were. He had a greasy old Homer, 
printed at Amsterdam, in 1630, on which he constantly sat 
during school hours, which he read, or rather devoured, in 
recreation-time — which he hugged convulsively under his arm 
at other seasons — with which we are seriously of opinion 
that he slept. When he explained a passage to you, he 
pinched you fiercely, or twined his long fingers in your gar- 
ments. He was dreadfully unshaven, and his long, unkempt, 
greasy hair, fell straggling over the collar of a coat that was 
more greasy still. It will be a long time before we shall for- 
get him, his learning, his dirt, his scared eager face, and his 
large gold spectacles. He had a tender heart, for all his fierce 
aspect, though : and the boys loved him. The great Gogo 
was gentle with him ; and Madame Gogo forbore to scold 
when he lost (as he was always losing) his pocket handker- 
chief. Once we were telling him, in our boyish way, what 
our idea of human happiness was : a pretty white cottage, 
green trellis work, a vine, and a flower-garden. " I have 
possessed them," he said; and the gold spectacles were 
dimmed, and two rivulets meandered down the dirty cheeks. 
He took us, we remember, too, one whole holiday, to visit 
his mother, a grand old lady, at a real spinning-wheel, and with 
hair glossier and whiter than the flax she was spinning. 
Some dim recollection have we of some half-uttered sentences, 
which, putting this and that together, as boys will do, created 
an impression on our mind that he had another name besides 
Thenard — a name as noble, perhaps, as Noailles-Noailles, or 
Rohan Rochfort ; and that fire and sword, the guillotine, and 
an unthankful prince, had had something to do with his un- 
happiness, his learning, and his dirt. 



MONSIEUR GOGO S. 5 

Mr. Lacrosse reigned supreme in the second class. He was 
a scaly, hard-featured, angular sort of man, full of hard geo- 
metrical problems, which he was always working out on the 
large class-room black board, for our edification, and in secret, 
on bits of broken slate, for his own. In his geological forma- 
tion, chalk had decidedly the best of it. His fingers, hair, 
and costume were always thickly powdered with that sub- 
stance ; if a boy offended him, he chalked his name up on 
the wall, or behind the door ; if he wished to instruct others, 
or to amuse himself, he still continually chalked. 

The third class was governed by a mild man, whose hair 
was red, and whose name was Moufnet. To his care were 
confided the very little boys — the moutaros, as in the Pen- 
sion Gogo we called them. He disliked tuition, and was re- 
ported to have wept because his parents would not allow him 
to be apprenticed to a hair- dresser. He endeavoured with 
laudable though unrewarded perseverance, to cultivate a 
moustache ; but after nine months' endeavours, failing 
lamentably, he resigned his situation, and we saw him no 
more. 

As to the classical master, M. Galofruche, the less said 
of him, we are afraid, the better. He was a scholar of 
considerable acquirements, but erratic to the extent — so the 
report ran among the boys — of having his hair curled, and 
of going to balls every night (he did not sleep within the 
walls of the Establishment Gogo). He was continually hum- 
ming refrains of vaudeville couplets, when he should have 
been attending to our scanning. M. Gogo once discovered a 
crushed rose and a billet doux on pink note-paper, between the 
leaves of his Greek Gradus ; so, between these and other mis- 
deeds, he came to shame. Contradictory rumours were cur- 
rent as to what became of him after his Hegira or flight (for 
he bolted in debt to his washerwoman, and to several of the 
senior boys). Some averred that he had become a tight-rope 
dancer at one of the small Boulevard Theatres ; others, that 
he had offered himself as a substitute for the conscription, and 
had joined the banner of his country in Algiers. 

There were, besides these masters, or professeurs, as they 
were more politely styled, certain unhappy men, called pions, 
martyrs, whose lamentable duties consisted in watching the 



6 MONSIEUR GOGO S. 

boys during their hours of recreation ; in accompanying them 
when they went out walking, and seeing that they did not eat 
too much sweet-stuff; in conducting them to bed, to the bath, 
and to church ; in fact, in being their assiduous overlookers, 
guides, philosophers, friends, and slaves. They had a hard 
life of it, those poor pions — young men, mostly of some 
education, but without means ; they tyrannised over the little 
boys ; they succumbed ignominiously and cringed dolefully, to 
the bigger ones ; the director Gogo snubbed them ; the 
partner of his joys openly and blatantly bullied them. They 
were the unclean things — the Parias of the Pension. 

Pardon us, oh reader ! if we have been somewhat too 
diffuse regarding the executive staff of the establishment. 
But from the men ye shall know the things. Let us linger 
for a moment to give a line to Jugurtha Willoughby, LL.D., 
Bachelier-es-Arts of the University of France, and Professor of 
the English language and literature. He came twice a week, 
and was the English master. We looked at him as something 
connected with home, though he had been in France so long, 
that he spoke French much better than English, and could 
even have taught, we think, the former language better than 
the latter. He had a sufficiently numerous class, the mem- 
bers of which were supposed to study the English tongue in 
its most recondite branches, but whose progress in the 
Anglican vernacular appeared to us always to stop at the 
enunciation of two simple and expressive words, " God-dam," 
and "Rosbif;" to both of which they persisted in attaching 
significations utterly irreconcilable with their real meaning, 
and which they delighted in applying to us, as a species of 
reproach for our Britannic origin, personally and offensively. 

The dancing-master's name we forget : we remember him 
only as " Cours de dame" he being in the habit of inundating 
the columns of the newspapers, and stencilling the walls of 
Paris with an announcement bearing that heading. He had 
an immense golden or gilt snuff-box, and told us, in the 
intervals of the Pastorale and the Cavalier seul, genteel anec- 
dotes of the aristocracy, and particularly of a mythical per- 
sonage, one "Kin," the friend of the Prince Regent of 
Britain, and for a long period of time the arbiter elegantiarum 

* ™ — 



MONSIEUR GOGO S. 7 

Kean. He, Cours de danse, was a worthy man, and had an 
excellent method of teaching a boy to waltz well. He waltzed 
with the patient himself, and whenever he made a false step, 
trod inexorably on his toes. So at last the boy got sore and 
sure-footed. Kammeron, the professor of music and singing, 
only merits a passing word. He was remarkable for wear- 
ing orange- coloured pantaloons, and was insufferably vain. 
We rather liked him ; for so soon as he sat down to the 
piano, so sure was he to burst forth into vocal and instru- 
mental illustration of one of the innumerable romances he 
had composed ; and while he pounded and howled, we played 
odd and even. 

Our daily life at Monsieur Gogo's ! First, there was the 
Bell. A dreadful bell it was. Loud of utterance, harsh, 
jangling, fierce of tone. We hated it ; for it rang us to bed 
the first night we were left at school — a night daguerreotyped 
with painful minuteness, and marked with the blackest of 
stones, in our amd in most boys' minds. The woful change 
from the soft couch and gentle nurturing of home ; the gentle 
hands that drew the curtains ; the kind voices that bade us 
good night ; to the hard pallet, damp, mouldy atmosphere, 
bare floor ; the bedfellow who kicked you, and deprived you 
of your legitimate share of counterpane ; the neighbour who 
pelted you with hard substances; the far-off boy in the corner, 
who reviled you and mocked you sorely, not through any 
special deed of your own, but because you were a "new 
boy ;" and in the morning the cruel bell, — ding- a- ding-dong, 
ding-a-ding-dong, it went ruthlessly, remorselessly, unceas- 
ingly, as it seemed. It hung close to that portion of the 
wall touched by our bed-head; and at five o'clock every 
morning, summer and winter, it woke us from dreams of 
mothers and sisters far away in the British Islands, to the 
stern realities of a strange school. It pealed again in five 
minutes, to remind us of the necessity for getting up (as 
if we ever could forget it after hearing it once) ; and again 
in three, after which time any boy found in the dormitories 
was punished. Pass over the moist lavatory, where, shiver- 
ing, we endeavoured to turn indomitable taps, and to mollify 
unsoftenable soap. Pass over the five minutes past in the 
refectory for prayers (how sincerely, though undevoutly, we 



8 MONSIEUR GO GO S. 

used to wish it was for breakfast, where a Pater noster, an 
Ave Maria, and a Pro peccatis were said by the boy who 
had it in rotation to do so). Pass over these, and come 
with us to our class-rooms — long, bare, desk-furnished, map- 
hung galleries, the only difference between which and English 
school-rooms was, that the masters had pupils instead of 
desks, and that one extremity of the apartment was gar- 
nished with a huge black board called the "tableau," on one 
side of which hung a sponge fastened to a string, and on the 
other a box of pieces of chalk.* 

We confess we never could manage the before-breakfast 
lessons to which, from six till eight, we were daily doomed. 
In summer we sighed for a run in the fields ; in winter the 
attention due to our Csesars and Virgils was wofully dis- 
turbed by attempts to keep our fingers warmed by blowing 
on them. There was a stove situated very nearly at the 
top or post of honour of the class ; and we are afraid that 
our occasional elevation to the post of " first boy" was due 
more to our love of warmth than to our love of learning. 
At eight — after more, though briefer, prayer — we adjourned 
in joyous file to the refectory, where to each boy was served 
a capacious bowl, holding about a quart of hot milk, into 
which was poured about a gill of coffee. With this we were 
entitled to take literally as much bread as ever we chose ; 
large hunches of the staff of life, cut from loaves bearing a 
strong resemblance, in size and shape, to cart-wheels, being 
assiduously handed about in baskets. Twenty minutes were 
allowed for this meal ; then followed a scamper in the play- 
ground till nine o'clock, when the day-boys arrived ; the 
middle-aged boys into their respective classes, and the col- 
legians to the College Bourbon, which was in the adjacent 
Rue St. Lazare, and approached, of course, through the 
never-failing Miresmonisl. We were too closely under the 
surveillance of our piojis to turn our short daily voyages 
in the streets to any advantage in the way of purchasing 
forbidden dainties, visiting wax-work shows, or indulging in 
any of those eccentricities in which it is the nature of boys, 

* "We speak of the black board, as peculiar to French, schools, as it was a 
score of years ago ; but its use is becoming very general now in English places 
of education, especially in those conducted on the Pestalozzian system. 






MONSIEUR GOGO S. \3 

when " out of bounds," to delight. Indeed, we should have 
preferred, on the whole, performing the daily journeys to 
and from college in carriages ; for we were, on most occa- 
sions, sadly harassed and maltreated by hosts of the little 
blackguard boys — those long-haired, short-bloused, ragged 
urchins, the gamins de Paris. They lay await for us in shady 
places and dark entries ; they made savage forays on us 
from solitary portes cocker es ; they flung offensive missiles at 
us, and splashed the malodorous contents of gutters in our 
faces. Their principal enmity to us, we suppose, was caused 
by our not having holes in our trousers, as they had. 

The class-rooms at college were very like our class-rooms at 
school, save that there were no desks, and we wrote upon our 
knees, and that the masters wore square black caps, and long 
gowns, somewhat resembling those in which are apparelled the 
vergers of our ancient and venerable cathedrals. Here, at col- 
lege, we asked, from nine till twelve, for what soft youth Pyrrha 
decked her golden hair; we expressed our indignation at the 
conduct of the faithless shepherd, Paris ; we despised the osten- 
tation of Persian magnificence, and we performed those curious 
and intricate feats of tumbling with Greek verbs, which always 
remind us now of the acrobatic gentlemen in spangles and 
cotton drawers, who tie themselves into knots, and twist them- 
selves in the boa-constrictor manner about the legs and backs 
of chairs. At twelve we went back again to the Pension, 
where we made breakfast Number Two off hot meat, vegeta- 
bles, fruit, with the fourth of a bottle of wine for each boy. 
Then, play till two; school or college till five; back to dinner, 
where we had pretty much the same sort of repast as break- 
fast Number Two, with the addition of soup, cheese, and a 
larger allowance of wine (yin ordinaire), be it understood. 
After dinner we played until seven ; got up our exercises for 
next day until nine ; then, after another Pater noster, Ave 
Maria, and Pro peccatis, went to bed. 

Of course, we grumbled : boys always will — even men 
occasionally will. We threw out scornful insinuations respect- 
ing the quality of the soup. One of our middle-aged boys 
averred that he had seen, with his own eyes, Francois, the 
servant, filling up the wine-bottles at the pump. We grum- 
bled at the eggs or lentils on Fridays and fast-days ; at the 



10 MONSIEUR GOGO S. 

quality of the bread ; at the ill-temper of the masters ; at the 
length of the lessons ; at the brevity of the play-time. Yet, 
putting the Pension Gogo in comparison with some highly- 
respectable, and even expensive (and of course aristocratic) 
establishments for the education of youth in this favoured 
island — remembering the " stick-jaw pudding," "resurrec- 
tion pie," sour table-beer, and hound-like treatment boys 
occasionally meet with in Albion the free — it strikes us that 
we were really not badly treated in the victualling line, and 
that we had not much cause to grumble. 

There were three remarkable characteristics of the Pension 
Gogo, to which we would wish to call attention ; yea, three 
marvels, which deserve, we think, a line apiece. The boys 
seldom, if ever, spent their pocket-money in the purchase of 
saccharine or savoury edibles, as is the custom of our English 
youth to do. Secondly, each boy brought with him a silver 
spoon and fork, and a holder for his table-napkin, which, 
mirabile dictu, when he left were returned to him ! Thirdly, in 
the whole of the Pension Gogo there were to be found nor 
birch, nor cane, nor strap. 

The school was managed entirely without corporal punish- 
ment. In the three years we were there, a few boxes on the 
ear may have been administered in extreme cases ; a few pair 
of ears may have been pulled ; and one boy, we remember, 
who was extraordinarily contumacious, was, by the Principal, 
solemnly, though softly, kicked from the class-room. But we 
had no daily — hourly — exhibitions of torture ; no boys writh- 
ing under a savage cane ; no counting the weals on your arms 
when you went to bed, and declaring you could bear thrashing 
better than So-and-so. We don't know whether these things 
are really "better managed in France;" but we aver, that 
afterwards, when we were beaten like a dog, at an English 
school, we preferred the system of the Pension Gogo, where a 
hundred and fifty boys were kept in order without beating. 

You are not to suppose that at the Pension Gogo there were 
no punishments. There were divers pains and penalties to 
which recalcitrant boys were liable. Fines, bad marks, im- 
positions, deprivation of recreation, were among these. For 
graver offences the culprit knelt on a form, or in a corner, 
which to us seemed ridiculous, and not salutary; for the kneel- 



MONSIEUR GOGO'S. 11 

ing one generally employed himself in making hideous grimaces 
at us, or at his instructor, when that sage's back was turned. 
The ultimo ratio regum, the peine forte et dure, was incarceration 
in a grim apartment contiguous to the wine-cellar, called the 
Cave, where bread-and- water was the diet, solitude the adjunct, 
and of which dreary legends of spectres and rats were current. 
The punishment, however, which we most dreaded was the 
weekly bulletin — Bulletin hebdomadaire. This was a ceremony 
which took place every Saturday afternoon, at dinner-time. 
The Principal Gogo, just as we had finished our soup, and 
were preparing for an onslaught on the bouilli, would fortify 
himself with a huge pinch of snuff, and read from a paper as 
long and as ominous-looking as an inn-reckoning, or a bill- 
of-costs, the register of our conduct, our studies, our progress 
during the week. When the good boys' names were men- 
tioned, with favourable comments on their rectitude of conduct, 
they simpered over their meat, and eat their victuals with 
blushing satisfaction. But when it came to the turn of the 
idle, the contumacious, the naughty boys, how they writhed — 
how they groaned ! Marginal references as to their incorri- 
gible disposition were inscribed on the Bulletin. " Abomi- 
nable," "execrable," "insupportable;" these were chalked 
against their names, or thundered at them by the indignant 
Gogo. The Bulletin hebdomadaire spoilt many a boy's dinner 
in our time ; for that we can avouch. 



CITIES 

IN PLAIN CLOTHES. 



Theue is a class of thinkers, who, right or wrong, are 
never satisfied with the bare assurance that every medal has 
its reverse, and every shield a gold as well as a silver side, 
hut are continually striving to make themselves acquainted 
with the side opposite to that ordinarily presented to them. 
In so doing, they ask obtrusive questions, take liberties with 
established cobwebs, and overturn received and accepted 
ghosts in order to inquire into the physical peculiarities of the 
turnips, broom handles, and calico sheets of which those 
ghosts are sometimes composed. Not satisfied with Philip 
sober, they have the impertinence to scrutinise Philip drunk ; 
not content with the due execution of justice upon a culprit, 
they must needs know what becomes of the executioner after- 
wards ; and as though they had not enough of things as they 
are, clamour for things as they were, and as they ought to be. 
These embarrassing thinkers are distinguished in infancy by a 
propensity for poking their flaccid little fingers into the eyes 
of their nurses and relations, doubtless following out some 
infantine theory as to the structure of the orbs of vision ; in 
childhood, by constant endeavours to teach difficult feats of 
gymnastics to dumb animals and to make them eat strange 
viands ; — such as wooden pine-apples glued on the plate ; and, 
by the ripping up, scraping, pegging, and otherwise mutilating 
all their toys — notably in the case of Shem, Ham, and Japhet 
from the Noah's ark, whom they make to swim in the wash- 
hand basin (in company with the magnetic duck and the 
elastic eel), and otherwise maltreat till every vestige of paint 
diappears from their strange faces and stranger costumes, and 
Ham, the traditional blackamoor of the family, has nothing to 
reproach himself with on the score of colour. At school they 



CITIES IN PLAIN CLOTHES. 13 

are remarkable for surreptitiously keeping hedge-hogs in their 
lockers, flaying the covers off grammars and copybooks to 
make silkworm boxes, and for persisting in the refusal or 
inability to acknowledge that the angle a b is equal to the 
angle c d, stating that it isn't and is much larger. In man- 
hood and mature age, they either become busy-bodies, insuffer- 
able bores telling you irrelevant history and " trying back " a 
score of times during the narration to relate the lives and 
adventures of the actors therein, and of their relations ; or, 
they invent steam-engines and cotton-looms, discover planets, 
settle the laws of gravitation, and found systems of philosophy. 
The astronomer and the quidnunc ; Plato and the child who 
does Shem, Ham, and Japhet's washing, Sir Isaac Newton and 
the gentleman in the sky-blue coat, green umbrella, white hat, 
striped calimancoes, eye-glass and Hessian boots, with whom 
Mr. Wright, comedian, is acquainted; have more in common 
than you would imagine, sometimes. 

I must confess, myself, that my train of thought is essen- 
tially of a Bohemian and desultory nature. My life has been 
a digression. I never could remember a thing in time, or 
forget it in season ; for, though I respect and glory in the 
statute of limitations as a legislative enactment, I can't apply 
it to men or to things. I was always more curious about the 
strings than about the puppets. I like Punch ; but I like the 
velveteen-clad histrion who lies perdu behind the striped 
drapery, and without whose aid Punch could not squeak, and 
Shallaballah would be yet unbastinadoed ; much better I like 
the " flies" and the mezzanine floor than the green-room or 
the prompt box. I have a desultory unprofitable fancy for 
old books, old pictures, and old furniture ; but, like the 
imprudent poor relation who was disinherited for liking gravy, 
I am sensible of having lost several friends by an inveterate 
habit of rummaging over ragged book- stalls and brokers' 
sheds, and standing, speculating, before rag and bottle-shops. 
I was cut dead once by an intimate acquaintance for walking 
down Drury Lane with two copper candlesticks, of curious 
make, which I had just purchased of a neighbouring broker, 
who tempted me sadly, besides, with a human skull, a life- 
preserver, and two volumes of " Elegant Extracts/' for five 
shillings — a bargain. 



14 CITIES IN PLAIN CLOTHES. 

Some random speculations I have already indulged in as to 
some curious dualities of costume and character in man and 
woman-kind. I find myself constantly recurring to the same 
subject, constantly poring over that eccentric etching by 
Gillray, called the " doublures," where heads of dukes and 
politicians, philosophers and divines, cast shadows on the 
wall, which, though rendering feature for feature, yet are 
strangely metamorphosed into satyrs, demons, donkeys, and 
Silenuses. If I have not hopelessly wearied you with double 
men, will you accord me, reader, a modicum of patience 
while I babble of double cities. 

Of cities in plain clothes rather — in their apparel of home- 
spun, very different from the gala suit they wear on high days 
and holidays, and in books of travel. And, I pray you, do 
not taunt me with being fantastic for giving corporeality to 
mere agglomerations of houses, and for assuming that cities 
may wear clothes, plain or otherwise. I appeal to the walls 
and ceilings of Greenwich Hospital, "Windsor Castle, and 
Hampton Court, where sprawl the saints of Verrio and 
Laguerre. Cities of all sorts sprawl incarnate on those 
gigantic works of art ; painted by the mile, and paid for, as 
the bills delivered of the artists inform us, by the yard. The 
galleries of Versailles boast battalions of personified cities, 
some in holiday clothes, some in plain clothes, and not a few 
with no clothes at all. Louis P hilip pe commissioned Pradhier 
to execute two statues of Lille and Strasbourg for the Place 
de la Concorde — which stand there to this day, and are noble 
specimens of embodied cities, though I certainly miss the pate 
defoie gras from the trophies on the pedestal of the latter 
capital. If the " gentle Severn " be allowed to have a "crisp 
head;" if half-a-dozen rivers embodied in bronze are allowed 
to empty water-jugs in the court-yard of Somerset House ; if 
the very north wind itself is with impunity individualised and 
made to figure in pictures and sculpture as a blustering 
railer, with puffed-out cheeks, I certainly may be allowed to 
give my cities flesh and raiment. Moreover, I have history 
and custom on my side. Doesn't Mr. De Quincey call 
Oxford Street, and by implication, London, a " stony-hearted 
step-mother?" Is not Venice called the Queen of cities? 
Was not Babylon the great distinguished by a very rude 



CITIES IN PLAIN CLOTHES. 15 

name ? She must have worn plain clothes even, besides the 
historical scarlet. 

I don't exactly envy, but I sigh for the lot of those who 
possess imagination, for I have none. If I had, I should be 
contented with the ideal and imaginative garments of a city, 
without meddling with those coarser, plainer habiliments, 
which to dull realist eyes they wear. I should be content 
with the cities that poets sing, that painters limn, that rap- 
turous tourists describe, but for this infusion of realism in 
the nectar of ideality, that shows them very different and 
changed. 

Let me take a city. — Constantinople. What a holiday 
dress she wears in Mr. Thomas Allom's pictures, in the pages 
of Byron and Hope, in Mr. Lewis's lithographs, in the eyes 
even of the expectant tourist on board the Peninsular and 
Oriental Company's steamer, who, disappointed with Naples, 
Malta, and Athens, opens wide his eyes with wonder, admira- 
tion and delight, when he first surveys the City of the Sultan 
from the Golden Horn ; when he sees glittering against the 
blue sky the thousand minarets, the fairy-like kiosques, the 
solemn dome of Saint Sophia, the shining cupola of the 
mosque of Achmet, the seraglio, the arsenal, the palaces of 
the Pachas, the grove of masts of all nations, the sparkling 
shoals of caiques, with the gaily dressed boatmen. Let us 
enter into that tourist for a moment. He is a native, we 
will say, of Clapham ; Stockwell was his alma mater ; Cam- 
berwell resounds with his erudition. He is well read in 
that curious repertory of books that go to make up in Eng- 
land the usual course of reading of a young man in the 
middle classes of society. He is decidedly imaginative, 
passably prejudiced and opiniated, after the manner of free- 
born Englishmen, and is the hope and joy of a wholesale 
house in the Manchester line, and in Bread Street, Cheapside. 
We will call him Moole. 

" A few moments," cries Mr. Moole, " a few trifling 
formalities at the Custom House, and I shall land in the 
city of Constantine, the Stamboul of the Muslim, the Istambol 
to which the noble Childe fled, leaving behind him at Athens 
his heart and soul in the care of the Maid of Athens — now, 
Mrs. Black. I shall pass by the gates of the Seraglio, where 



16 CITIES IN PLAIN CLOTHES. 

the heads of rebellious pachas scorch in the noon-tide sun ; 
where fierce eunuchs guard the sacred approaches : but all 
their glittering blades will not prevent me from revelling in 
imagination amidst the fragrant gardens of the Seraglio, in 
the soul- entrancing glances of the gazelle -eyed Gulbeyaz, 
Dudus, Gulnares, and other lights of the harem. I shall 
listen to the dulcet notes of the mandolin, hear the pattering 
fall of perfumed waters, catch heavenly glimpses of dark-eyed 
beauties behind lattices, puffing lazily at the aromatic chi- 
bouque, or perchance become an unwilling witness of some 
dark and terrible tragedy, — the impalement of a grand vizier, 
or the sack-and-salt-waterising of some inconstant houri of the 
Padisha. A few moments," this enthusiast from the Surrey 
hills continues, " and I shall pace by the sacred mosques ; 
and, entering them, gaze at the fretted roofs, and the out- 
spread carpets checkered with worshippers, with their faces 
turned towards Mecca. I shall see the stately Moslem career 
by on his Arab Barb, wrapped in his furred pelisse, his brows 
bound with his snow-white turban, his glittering handjar by 
his side, his embroidered papouches on his feet. I shall stroll 
through the crowded Bezesteen, where the rich and varied 
wares of the Oriental world are displayed. Courtly Armenian 
merchants, with coal-black beards, will invite me into their 
cushioned warerooms, present me with coffee and pipes, and 
show me gorgeous wares and intoxicating perfumes. Anon, 
the clamour of military music heralds the passage of a legion 
of janissaries, clad in ' barbaric pearl and gold.' Anon, I 
stroll into a coffee-house, where a Greek storyteller is relating 
the legend of the * Fisherman and the Geni ' to the Capitan 
Basha, the Kislar Aga, the Bostangi -bashi, and the Sheikh- 
al-Islam. Now, a horde of dancing dervishes whirl fiercely 
by; now, a band of Alme dancers remind me, in their graceful 
poses, of Herodias, Esmeralda, and Mademoiselle Cerito. 
Now, a black slave invites me to the splendid mansion of 
a venerable Barmecide close by ; who — after making believe 
to eat, pretending to wash his hands, and to get drunk with 
visionary wine — entertains me with a banquet of pilaffs, and 
stewed kids, stuffed with pistachio nuts, washed down by wine 
of Cyprus and sherbet, cooled with snow. And now, oh! 
joy of joys, I catch a pair of black eyes circled with henna, 



CITIES IN PLAIN CLOTHES. 17 

fixed on me with a glance of tender meaning, through the 
folds of a silken veil. I see a little fairy foot peeping from 
loose Turkish trowsers : the vision disappears — but an old 
woman (the universal messenger of love in the East) accosts 
me mysteriously, and presents me with a bouquet composed 
of dandelions, bachelor's buttons, and the fragrant flower 
known as ' cherry pie,' all of which say as plainly as the 
language of flowers (known at Stamboul as at Stockwell) can 
speak : ' Meet me at eight this evening at the secret gate 
opposite the third kiosque past Seraglio point.' What tales I 
shall have to tell when I get back to Clapham." 

Land, if you like, at Pera, the European suburb. Plenty 
of plain clothes here. A mangy hill spotted with leprous 
houses, and infested by scurvy dogs. The English embassy, 
looking like an hospital ; the Russian ditto looking like a 
gaol. A circus for horse-riders, and one or two ramshackle 
hotels, claiming decided kindred in the way of accommodation 
and general aspect with the fifteenth-rate foreign houses in 
the back settlements of Leicester Square ; and in respect to 
prices, with the Clarendon or Mivart's. A population strongly 
resembling that of London, when Doctor Johnson affirmed it 
to be the "common sewer of Paris and of Rome." Dirt, 
dead dogs, oyster-shells, dust ; no pavement nor lamps, no 
gutters, no sewers. Houses that would have rejoiced the 
heart of that Chinese sage, who invented roast-pig, for they 
are delightfully easy to be burnt down, and are being burnt 
continually. Such are the plain clothes of Pera. Land at 
Galata, Mr. Moole ; you come across more dogs, live and dead, 
more dirt, oyster-shells, dust, and leprous houses. Land at 
Scutari, and ask for sewers, lamps, or gutters, and you shall 
find none. Instead of them you shall find unwholesome 
streets ; or, rather, alleys resembling the worst parts of Church 
Lane, Saint Giles's, dovetailed on to the Rue-aux Feves in 
Paris, and the Coomb in Dublin. Ask for horrible smells, 
infected hovels — where the great adjuster of the population, 
the plague, hides from year to year, every now and then 
leaping from his hole to take the census with a sword : ask 
for these and they will start up by hundreds. Ask for the 
stately Moslem, and you shall be shown a fat man with a 
sleepy expression of countenance, and looking remarkably 



18 CITIES IN PLAIN CLOTHES. 

uncomfortable in an ill-made European coat and a red skull 
cap. Ask for the Bezesteen, and you shall elbow your way 
through a labyrinth of covered lanes, giving not a bad idea 
of Rag Fair, the Temple in Paris, and the Soho Bazaar, 
squeezed into Newgate Market. Ask for the dancing Der- 
vishes, you shall see a set of dirty old ragamuffins executing 
lewd gambadoes for copper paras. Ask for Saint Sophia, 
and you will be enabled to speculate on the white-washed 
mosaics, and the tawdry gimcrack lamps and carpets, and 
eggs strung on strings. Ask for the lights of the harem, 
and you shall meet a succession of black silk pillow-cases, 
capped with white ditto, shod with yellow shoes down at 
heel, shuffling through the lanes, or jolting about in crazy 
carts drawn by bullocks. Ask for the janissaries, and you 
will be told that they were all massacred on the plain of the 
Atmeidan more than thirty years ago, and in their stead, are 
slouching louts of peasants in uncouth and mongrel European 
costume. Peep slyly into a harem (which you will not 
succeed in doing, my Mend), and you will see fat women 
with coarse features lolling wearily on carpets, in rooms with 
bare walls, and the principal furniture of which is composed 
of French clocks. Ask for Stamboul the romantic, the beauti- 
ful, the glorious, the Constantinople of the last of the Paleo- 
logi, the Byzantium of the Romans, the Istambol of Bajazet 
and Mahomet the conqueror, and you shall be told that this 
dirty, swarming, break-neck city is it. You are a young 
man of a strongly imaginative temperament, Mr. Moole, I 
therefore advise you to go on board the Peninsular and Oriental 
Company's steamer again as fast you can ; from whose deck 
you may again survey the enchanting and superb prospect of 
the city, and solace yourself with engravings after Messrs. 
Allom and Lewis. These will be a great consolation to you 
when you are frying in quarantine on your road home, and 
you may conjure up quite a splendid court-suit for Constanti- 
nople, and forget all about its plain clothes. 

" Lives there the man with soul so dead, 

Who never to himself has said " — 

Venice ? Beautiful Venice ? Ah ! Mr. Moole, says Imagina- 
tion, if you had gone there, you would not have been disap- 



CITIES IN PLAIN CLOTHES. 19 

pointed. Realism can't sneer away the Campanile, the 
Grand Canal, the Ducal Palace, the Dogana, and the Bridge 
of Sighs. Madam Imagination, if you please, let me peep 
at Venice, at the commencement, let me say, of the last 
century. Forthwith Imagination calls from the ends of the 
earth four score poets, twelve score sentimental tourists, a 
bevy of blooming young ladies, far too numerous for me to 
count, and the editors of six defunct landscape annuals. 
" Venice, if you please, ladies and gentlemen," she says to 
them. " Marble halls," they answer in a breath. " Land- 
scapes, or, rather, water-scapes, with crimson, green, and gold 
skies, orange waves, and blue palaces (see Turner) ; or gon- 
dolas with pea-green hulls, and feluccas with crimson velvet 
sails (see Holland). The Doge, a venerable old man, with a 
white beard and a high cap, constantly occupied with dandling 
the lion of St. Mark, curry-combing the winged horses, 
spending his afternoons with his ear close to the * Lion's 
mouth,' jotting down mems. of conspiracies hot and hot, 
and going out twice a week in a gilded galley to wed the 
Adriatic ; varying occasionally these pursuits, by putting his 
sons to the torture, pursuing with fire and sword people who 
wrote impertinent things about his wife on the back of his 
chair, and making fierce last-dying speeches to the people 
from the top of the giant's staircase. The Council of Ten, 
meeting everyday, masked every man jack of them; [Gentlemen! 
says Imagination, expostulatingly] no ; not masked, but 
dressed in crimson velvet cloaks, each councillor sitting under 
his own portrait by Titian, who died some time before ; but 
never mind that. A carnival all the year round, and such a 
carnival ; the Piazza San Marco thronged with masquers in 
every variety and shade of splendour of costume. All the 
canals (all bordered by palaces decorated by Titian and Sebas- 
tiano del Piombo) studded with gondolas, painted with fanci- 
ful arabesques, hung with splendid tapestry, filled with purple 
velvet lovers and white satin angels (see Lake Price), making 
love and eating ices beneath a moon certainly twice as large 
as any French, German, or English one. The gondolier, in 
his picturesque striped silken sash, guides his frail bark, 
standing gracefully on one leg, and warbling a hymn to Our 
Lady of the Sea. But ah ! little does the purple satin lover 

c 2 



20 CITIES IN PLAIN CLOTHES. 

whom lie is conducting to a rendezvous, and who sits jauntily 
at the prow, sweeping the strings of his guitar with an agile 
hand, and calling up echoes from the distant lagunes — little 
does that cavalier reck that the treacherous boatman has be- 
trayed him to his enemy — that at this very moment, behind 
the waterspout of the Palazzo Boffi, the wicked Cavaliere 
Lazaro di Hardoppari is waiting for him with two bravi and 
three poignards, and that at the moment when his white satin 
enchantress, the Lady Bianca, is descending the marble stair- 
case to meet him, and before even he has time to invoke his 
patron saint, San Giacomo Robinsino, he will be laid at 
length on the Boffi terrace, his guitar shattered, his head 
towards the stairs, and his toes turned up. "Woeful history ! 
followed by the despair, madness (in white satin) and death 
of the Lady Bianca, the tragical end of Hardoppari (poisoned 
by his brother the Cardinal in a venison pasty), and the 
remorse of Sproggino, the gondolier ; who, after performing 
amazing feats of piracy in the Grecian archipelago, founded 
a convent and asylum for dissolute boatmen, died in the odour 
of sanctity, and was canonised. (His picture winked only 
last Pentecost.) Such is Venice, please your ladyship ; " and 
the whole army of poets, engravers, sentimentalists, and young 
ladies break forth into such a strumming of guitars and 
bleating of " Beautiful Venice, city of sunshine !" "The 
merry gondolier," the engravers accompanying them with 
such force with their burins on their steel plates — that I am 
fain to stop my ears, the din is so great. 

Can this city, so brave in purple velvet and white satin, 
condescend ever to wear plain clothes ? Ay, that she can — 
very plain clothes : rags, dirty, greasy, unmitigated rags. 
Study the pictures of an artist, whose plain clothes' name was 
Antonio Canal, whose gala name is Canaletto, and who painted 
what he saw and knew — and you will discover these rags, 
sweltering too, on the palsied limbs of beggars in the gay 
Piazza di San Marco. Not confining yourself to Canaletto 
consult a certain Goldoni, one Gozzi, and one known as Filip- 
pante. They will show you Venice in plain clothes in the 
last century : — mud in the canals, griping poverty in the 
palaces, impudent intolerance in the churches, rapacious 
waiters in the coffee-houses (waiters in Venice !), and oh, 



CITIES IN PLAIN CLOTHES- 21 

realism of realisms ! oh, quietus of romance ! the Doge of 
Venice in a bag-wig, powdered, and a cocked hat ! The Car- 
nival, they will tell you, was merely a harvest-time for 
theatrical managers, silly Venetian "gents," who had a diffi- 
culty to play the fool with a mask on with any greater degree 
of completeness than they were in the habit of doing with 
uncovered faces ; and other classes, not here to be mentioned. 
They will inform you that no inconsiderable portion of the 
Venetian nobility lived by selling counterfeits of their pictures 
to amateurs ; by farming gaming-tables, and by trafficking in 
the honour of their daughters. They will show you that the 
race of Jaffiers, Pierres, and Belvideras is quite extinct ; that 
the lion's mouth is grown rusty ; and that poniards are 
not more in use than they are now in every wine shop in the 
Levant, when foreign sailors fall a quarrelling. As for the 
gondolas, instead of the arabesques and the tapestry, you will 
see shabby little boats with an awning like a carrier's cart, 
painted with funereal black, and rowed by a swarthy varlet, 
who has preserved at least the traditions of Venetian mosaic 
work in the darning and patching of his garments, who talks 
a patois unintelligible to many Italians, and who is egregiously 
extortionate. Such is " beautiful Venice." Not that I am 
for denying the claims of the Bride of the Adriatic for romance 
in toto ; but I stand for the existence of the plain clothes as 
well as the masquerade suit, for the existence of such homely 
things as Venice turpentine and Venetian blinds, as well as 
Venetian Doges and Venetian Brides. There is plenty of 
sustenance for the romantic minds in Venice even to-day, when 
the Austrian " autograph," as Professor Dandolo expressed 
it, has planted his banners on its towers. There is romance 
in that strange fantastic basilica, which brings old Rome, 
Byzantium, Greece, and modern Italy to the mind at once ; in 
the hot summer nights, when the Venetians lounge outside 
the cafes, and listen to Donizetti's music played by a Croat or 
Sclavonian band, and watch the padded Austrian officers 
twirling their tawny moustachios ; in the stones of that dreary 
Prison-palace, where so many true men have chafed to death 
beneath the burning piombi, for daring to think or to write 
that man has a heritage of freedom, which all the Autocrats 
in the universe cannot wholly waste or alienate. 



22 CITIES IN PLAIN CLOTHES. 



be of 



And, ere I leave Italy, one glance at the wardrobe 
another Italian city — Naples. She has her court dress ; Car- 
dinals in red stockings, Virgins in jewelled petticoats, the bay, 
Vesuvius, and Pompeii. But what a suit of plain clothes ! 
what squalid tatters ! what looped and windowed raggedness ! 
Those walking rag-shops in monkish garb, those dismal scare- 
crows, the romantic lazzaroni, those fetters and felon dresses, 
those hideous dungeons by the blue sea ! Imagination in- 
corrigible, in three vols, post 8vo, just out (see Evening 
paper), persists in seeing only Naples the sunny, the romantic, 
the beautiful. " Vedi Napoli e poi mori" " See Naples and 
die," says Imagination. " See Naples," says Reality sternly, 
in the shape of Mr. Gladstone, "see St. Januarius' sham 
blood, and Poerio's fetters, and Ferdinand's Shrapnel shells, 
and then die with shame and horror." 

Paris during the Regency of Gaston of Orleans. An 
escape from plain clothes, at least here : — we know all 
about that dear delightful period. The free, jovial Regent, 
with his embroidered coats of many colours, and that dear 
eccentric Abbe Dubois, his minister. And Mr. John Law's 
scheme, — rather expensive it must be allowed — but Monsieur 
Law gave such magnificent entertainments at his hotel in 
the Place Vendome, and such a crowd of archbishops, 
princes, dukes, and noble ladies, that followed at his heels, 
begging and praying for shares. And there was Cartouche, 
that romantic robber ; and that other brigand, whose name 
we forget, but who was nick-named Monseigneur, from his 
perfect courtesy and politeness of manner. And there were 
the petits soupers, and the petites maisons, and the loges gril- 
lees, and the balls at the Opera, and the grey mousque- 
taires, and hoops and powder, and patches, and buhl tables, 
and china monsters, and poets who recited their verses in 
the boudoirs of Duchesses, and painters who transferred 
those Duchesses to canvas. Why, the whole of that merry, 
spangled Regency was one long holiday ! Granted. France, 
during the Regency, wore a brilliant holiday costume : a 
peach-coloured velvet coat, barred with gold and festooned 
with diamonds, cloth of gold waistcoat, crimson brocade 
smalls, fifty thousand livres' worth of lace at the throat and 
wrists ; silk stockings, gold clocks, red heels, jewelled-hilted 



CITIES IN PLAIN CLOTHES. &3 

swords, powder, patches, a dancing master's kit in one hand 
and a pasteboard puppet in the other ; pockets crammed with 
pink billet doux, lettres-de-cachet, and John Law's Mississippi 
shares ; folly on his lips and vice in his heart. But were 
there none who wore other raiment during that same Regency. 
How many hundred half-naked prisoners were languishing 
in the dungeons of the Bastile, by the orders of the eccentric 
Cardinal Abbe Dubois ? What sort of clothes wore those men, 
prosperous merchants once, ruined by John Law's famous 
scheme, who went forth to beg on the highway ? What 
clothes had the poets and the painters when they went from 
the Duchess's boudoir to die in the hospital, like Guillebert 
and Lantara ? What clothes, if any, had the miserable serfs, 
who writhed beneath the thraldom of the holiday makers in 
velvet — of the Abbes who wrote sonnets, and read their 
breviaries in the intervals of a petit souper — who lived on the 
black, filthy, nauseous substance complacently termed bread, 
and a loaf of which the Duke de la Valliere threw down on 
the council-table before the boy King, Louis the Fifteenth, 
saying, " There, Sire. Some millions of your subjects eat 
that/" Did you ever hear of one Barbier, Advocate of the 
Parliament of Paris, whose private journal of the Regency 
was lately published ? Barbier was the French Pepys, a 
gossiping, meddling, ill-conditioned busybody; but without 
Pepys' good-nature or hospitality. He had an auctioneer's 
talent for description, and a keen nose for scandal ; and half- 
an-hour's desultory sauntering through his slipslop pages, 
will teach you some strange secrets of the plain clothes of the 
good City of Paris during the Regency. 

If I name Paris during the Revolution, and especially dur- 
ing the reign of terror, the one-sided enthusiasts fly into the 
opposite extreme. Even then, Paris wore other clothes than 
the bloody masquerade dress she did her butcher's work in at 
the Abbaye, the Conciergerie, and in the Place Louis Quinze. 
She laid aside, sometimes, the scarlet Phrygian cap and the 
red flag. Fouquier Tinville, Collot d'Herbois, and other like 
" friends of the people," were not always sanguinary tyrants 
with their sleeves tucked up. They were, I dare say, over 
their dinners in the Palais National — with short-waisted coats, 
flapped waistcoats, buckskins, and top-boots — mighty pleasant 



24 CITIES IN PLAIN CLOTHES. 



. 



fellows to meet. Some of the most bloodthirsty of the Com- 
mittee of Safety were dramatic authors ; and, Paris in plain 
clothes, — quite another Paris from that yelling from the 
mouths of poissardes and tricoteuses for the lives of the aristo- 
crats — sat smilingly listening to such pieces as "La Mere 
Coupable" and " Robert, Chef de Brigands/' which were all 
the rage then. There were stage-dresses for the Convention, 
the club of the Jacobins, the Noyades, and the feasts of the 
Goddess of Keason ; but there were plain clothes in houses 
and shops, yea, and peace and quiet in families and hearts far 
from the great tempest. For all the gory fever raging, there 
must have been, as now, men and women unmindful of aristo- 
crats and democrats, little heeding the republic one and indi- 
visible, and whose whole hearts were in the quiet but deadly 
fight for bread ; who achieved fortunes or dreaded bankrupt- 
cies ; who hung on the smile or frown of a mistress or a lover ; 
— to whom every day brought its little private good and evil. 
Be not angry with me, sentimental tourists, and writers of 
stanzas, and imaginative painters. You have your Venices 
and Stambouls. But I have seen so many plays, and taken so 
many bad half-crowns, in my life, that I grow sceptical, and 
look twice at cities and at men, before I take them for 
granted. 



* 

« 



MINE INN. ' 



" Shall I not take mine ease in mine inn ? " asked that 
portly, witty, bnt most immoral and unprincipled knight who 
missused the king's press so — somethingably — in the matter 
of his charge of foot; and, whilom, was so staunch a supporter 
of the Boar's Head Tavern, in Eastcheap. Many men have 
taken their ease in their inn since the days of Sir John Falstaff 
and Mrs. Quickly. The meanest and the most famous have 
reposed in "mine inn;" and millions of reckonings have 
been paid, and millions of inn-frequenters take their ease now 
in that great, quiet hostelry, the Grave. 

To the contemplative man, and to the lover of social anti- 
quities, the subject of inns is associated with the pleasantest, 
the kindliest, the most genial, and the most elevated humanities. 
Our interest in inns is as old as Christianity itself; and, in 
one instance, our interest is mingled with awe and reverence 
and loving gratitude. The good Samaritan took the wounded 
man to an inn, and left there twopence for his subsistence ; 
and, to leave sacred for profane history, were there not inns 
in ancient Greece and Rome ? Were not the remains of inns 
discovered in the excavations of Pompeii ? Can any of us 
forget Horace's inn adventures in his journey to Brundusium? 
In England, inns are full of interest from the earliest ages. 
The brightest landmarks of our literary history lie in inns. 
From the "Tabard Inn," in Southwark, set forth that gallant 
company of Canterbury Pilgrims, whom Chaucer has rendered 
famous to all ages. The knight and the pardoner, the cook, 
and the wife of Bath : we can see them now, ambling, jing- 
ling, rustling in their quaint costume ; laughing, and story- 
telling, as they issue from the low portal of the old "Tabard." 
They shall not die, nor shall the pleasant memories of the 



26 MINE INN. 

"Tabard " and its fellow inns fade away while we have eyes 
to scan, and pens to transmit, the eulogies of Chaucer's 
glorious verse and of Stothafd's pencil. 

The "Boar's Head" in Eastcheap was a tavern; but it 
must have been an inn likewise. At least Dame Quickly 
" let out beds ; " for did not Sir John board and lodge there ? 
"Was it not in the dame's dolphin chamber, by a sea-coal fire, 
that the knight sat while the placable landlady was dressing 
his wounded head, broken by Prince Hal for likening his 
father, the King, to a singing man at Windsor ? Was it not 
into that dolphin chamber that entered unto Mrs. Quickly 
her gossip, the butcher's wife, who came to borrow a mess of 
vinegar for her dish of prawns; whereupon Sir John did 
desire to eat some, and was told by his considerate hostess 
that they were ill for a green wound ? Did he not in that 
same chamber bid the dame fetch him forty shillings ? How 
many score of times forty shillings had been borrowed there, 
I wonder ? Was it not in a room at the " Boar's Head" that 
Sir John departed his merry, disreputable life. There " he 
picked at the sheets, and babbled o' green fields, and there 
was but one way with him, for his nose was • as sharp as a 
pen." Here he died, and I will wager that had even that 
stern Chief Justice (who was so hard upon the knight for his 
excesses) read the exquisite account our Shakespeare has left 
us of Falstaff's death, the solemn magistrate would have 
dropped one tear to the memory of that humorous, incorrigible, 
immortal old sinner. 

Fat Jack had his country as well as his town inns. In the 
" Garter Inn," at Windsor, the glorious intrigue of the 
" Merry Wives " is chiefly conducted. Hither comes mine 
host of the "Garter," and Master Brook, jealous and mysterious, 
and Bardolph with his flaming nose, transformed into a 
decorous drawer, fetching in Sir John a cup of sack — "simple? 
No, with eggs." Here was that notable quarrel between 
Falstaff and his acolytes, touching the stolen fan and the 
fifteenpence the knight received as his share, on the ground 
that he would not endanger his soul gratis. I doubt if Sir 
John ever paid his reckoning at the " Garter " after his dis- 
comfiture, and he had begun to perceive that he had been 
made an ass. I doubt very much indeed whether mine host 



MINE INN. 27 

jolly and joke-loving as he was, ever had the face to present 
his little bill to the crest-fallen knight. 

Inns, as I have said, abound with literary and historical 
land-marks. Ben Jonson's last comedy was called the "New 
Inn." The first Protestant bishop (so Catholics say) was con- 
secrated at an inn — the "Nag's Head," in either Holborn or 
the Poultry. The ruin of King Charles the First was con- 
summated in an inn. Old Hooker, the divine, coming to 
London to preach at Paul's Cross, and alighting very wet and 
weary at an inn mostly resorted to by clergymen, was so 
kindly received by an artful landlady; so coddled and cockered 
up with possets and warm toasts, that, being a simple-minded, 
guileless man, he was easily inveigled into marrying the land- 
lady's daughter, an ignorant wench and a shrew. The poor 
man went to the altar like a witless dolt to the correction of 
the stocks : to his correction, indeed ; for his wife led him a 
dreadful life. One of his old pupils, a bishop's son, visiting 
him afterwards in his country parsonage, found him tending 
sheep with one hand and holding a Greek folio in the 
other ; and even from this employment he was called by his 
virago wife to rock the baby's cradle ! Sir Bulwer Lytton 
has a pleasant reminiscence of poor Hooker's married life in a 
scene in Pelham. 

Sir Walter Scott is great on inns at home and abroad. 
Julian Peveril's despatches are stolen from him at an inn: the 
fearful tribunal of the Vehmgericht hold their sittings in some 
awful subterranean cave beneath a German inn. The first 
scene of Kenilworth is laid at an inn: the most amusing 
scene in Rob Roy takes place in the " Clachan " inn of Aber- 
foil. Then we have the roadside inn, where the author of 
Waverley, in a white top coat and top boots, appears so myste- 
riously, and consumes so many beefsteaks : we have the inn 
where Rob Roy, decently disguised as Campbell, forces his 
company on Morris ; also, the inn for which Dick Tinto 
painted the sign : we have the inn of inns, which has im- 
mortalised the Tweedside village of Innerleithen, where Meg 
Dods holds her hosterial state, and bids defiance to commer- 
cial travellers. I might multiply instances of the lustre which 
the Great Wizard has shed over inns, at home and abroad, 
until you and I were tired. 



28 MINE INN. 

There is scarcely a great work by a great writer, but I find 
some pleasant mention of " mine inn " therein. To the 
" Hercules' Pillars " Squire Western sent bis chaplain to fetch 
his tobacco-box. At an inn did dear old Parson Adams fall 
into one of the most dreadful of his dilemmas. Don Quixote 
and inns are inseparable : in an inn he was drubbed ; in an 
inn he was tossed in a blanket. Gil Bias received many 
lessons of practical philosophy in inns. In one did the syco- 
phant praise him inordinately and devour Ids fish and his 
omelettes ; telling him afterwards never to place confidence in 
any one who told him that he was the eighth wonder of the 
world. The first provincial letter of Pascal was written to a 
friend supposed to be lodging at an inn. The best French 
vaudeville I know (and from which our own " Deaf as a Post" 
is translated) is called UAuberge Pleine — The Full Inn. Sir 
John Suckling the poet died at an inn in France. His ser- 
vant had robbed him and absconded, and his master, hastily 
pulling on his boots to pursue him, drew a rusty nail into his 
foot ; the wound from which mortifying, Sir John Suckling 
died. At an inn at St. Omer Titus Oates hatched some of 
his subtlest plots and made some of his grandest Popish dis- 
coveries. The inn adventures of the Chevalier de Grammont 
will not readily be forgotten. Beaumarchais, the famous 
author of the Mariage de Figaro, was arrested at an inn in 
Vienna by order of Maria Theresa. To step centuries back, 
it was also in a Viennese iirn that our Richard the Lion-hearted 
was discovered and captured by his perfidious enemy, the 
Duke of Austria. The author of Manon Lescaut died at an 
inn ; and in an inn (or at least a private hotel) in Bond Street 
died Laurence Sterne. It was his wish to die so, tended by 
the hands of strangers, and his wish was accomplished to the 
letter. He had himself in his works helped to immortalise 
"mine inn." At the village inn lay sick to death Lieutenant 
Lefevre : there he was tended by his son ; from that inn, and 
truly, staunch Corporal Trim declared that he would never 
march again ; from that inn my Uncle Toby vowed that he 
should march. And the man who could write the story of 
Lefevre could be a sensualist, and wish to die at an inn, un- 
tended and uncared for by friends and relatives, and could, 
and did die so. 



MINE INN. 29 

" In the worst inn's worst room " — you know the rest — 
died the great George Villiers, Duke of Buckingham. He 
had out-lived his fame, his health, his fortune, and his friends, 
and expired miserably at the house of a tenant at Kirby 
Moorside in Yorkshire. The deathless lines of Pope still 
place before us vividly the wretched apartment, half hung 
with mats, the plaster walls, the flock bed repaired with straw, 
the tape-tied curtains, the diamond George dangling from the 
bed where tawdry yellow vied with dirty red. 

Verily inns have their moralities as well as their humours. 
While the glasses jingle, and toasts and healths are drunk, 
and the song circulates in the parlour, mortality is putting 
on immortality above stairs, clay is returning to clay, dust to 
dust, ashes to ashes, Georges and Garters, stars and ribbons, 
pomps and vanities, all sinking quietly into nothingness ; 
there is nothing but a dead man in number three, and the 
undertaker must be sent for, and business will be rather 
dull above and brisk below until the gentleman in number 
three is buried. Do you remember that curious story in one 
of Theodore Hook's novels of the dead young lady in the inn 
bedroom ? There is a whole history of inn philosophy in that. 
We sing and rejoice : hot meats are brought in and out, and 
presently there drives up to the door a hearse, and something 
is brought down the stairs — the same stairs we have so often 
mounted to the club-room ; the mourners hide their faces in 
their white pocket-handkerchiefs ; the mutes take their last 
drain of gin or porter ; the " black job " (as the crazy Lord 
Portsmouth used to call a funeral) moves slowly off; the 
traveller who had put up at that inn sick and had died there, 
is borne off on that journey from which no traveller returns ; 
the windows are thrown up, the shutters opened, number 
three is dusted and arranged for, peradventure, wedding guests, 
and the inn resumes the current of its existence. Such are 
inns and such is life. 

I have been so prolix about famous men who have, by 
their lives and writings, cast immortality upon inns that — 
not forgetting I have as yet omitted to notice how many good 
writers of our own time have been eloquent upon inns — we 
are not, with impunity, to forget the many excellent inns as 
excellently depicted in the novels of the author of Pelham. 



30 MINE INN. 



entle- 



Tliere is a certain " Slaughters/' an inn for military gent 
men ; also a " Bootjack Hotel ; " also a villanous thieves' inn, 
■where one Corporal Brock and an Irish gentleman have a 
difficulty with Mrs. Catherine Hayes ; all of which inns are 
artistically described in the best style of inn lore by a certain 
author, who may as well be nameless here, inasmuch as every- 
body knows him and his writings. And that famous scribe 
Washington Irving, has he not discoursed delightfully of inns 
in Flanders, to which bold dragoons resorted; of inns in 
England, notably at Stratford-on-Avon ; and of a never-to-be- 
forgotten inn, in rainy weather, where there was a Stout 
Gentleman? Inns are not without their white days, their 
chronicles of royal and noble authors. From Apuleius in 
the Golden Ass to the editor of the Times in his yesterday's 
leaders, the wisest and most solemn big-wigs of literature 
have not thought inns (for praise or blame) beneath their 
notice. 

It is not my intention in this present paper to enter upon 
the subject of hotels; the younger yet aristocratic brothers 
of 'inns. Touching hotel life, hotel charges, and hotel cha- 
racter, I have, saving j'our excellencies' permission, acquired 
a considerable amount of experience and information, which 
I purpose to dispense for the general benefit, by and by. 
Meantime I would commend to you the consideration of inns. 
M Mine Inn " is rapidly becoming an institution of the past; 
it will soon be numbered among the things departed. The 
roadside inn, and the coaching inn, should have disappeared 
with post-chaises and fast stage coaches. They still linger on ; 
but they are daily being pushed from their stools by Rail- 
way Hotels, Terminus Taverns, and Locomotive Coffee- 
houses. They will soon have to say with the Latin Accidence, 
eramus — we were. 



SLANG. 



It lias been a pleasant conceit with philosophers and 
writers to distinguish the successive ages of what, in the 
plenitude of their wisdom, they call the world, by some 
metallic nickname. We have had the Golden Age, and the 
Silver Age, the Age of Iron, and the Age of Bronze • this 
present era will, perhaps, be known to our grandchildren as 
the age of Electro-plating, from its general tendency to shams 
and counterfeits ; and, when the capital of the Anglo-Saxon 
Empire shall be, some hundreds of years hence, somewhere in 
the South Seas, or in the centre of Africa or interior of 
China, the age that is to come may be known as the Age of 
Platina or that of Potassium, or some one of the hundreds 
of new metals, which will, of course, be discovered by that 
time. 

However this present age may be distinguished by future 
generations, whether ferruginously, or auriferously, or argen- 
tinally, there can be no doubt that the Victorian era will be 
known hereafter — and anything but favourably, I surmise — as 
an epoch of the most unscrupulous heterodoxy in the application 
of names. "What was once occasionally tolerated as a humorous 
aberration, afterwards degenerated into folly and perversity, 
and is now a vice and a nuisance. Without the slightest 
regard to the proprieties of nomenclature, or to what I may 
call the unities of signification, we apply names to objects, 
abstractions, and persons, stupidly, irrationally, and incon- 
sistently : completely ignoring the nature, the quality, the 
gender, the structure of the thing, we prefix to it a name 
which not only fails to convey an idea of what it materially 
is, but actually obscures and mystifies it. A persistence in 
such a course must inevitably tend to debase and corrupt 
that currency of speech which it has been the aim of the 



32 SLANG. 

greatest scholars and publicists, from the days of Elizabeth 
downwards, to elevate, to improve, and to refine ; and, if we 
continue the reckless and indiscriminate importation and 
incorporation into our language of every cant term of speech 
from the columns of American newspapers, every Canvas 
Town epithet from the vocabularies of gold-diggers, every 
bastard classicism dragged head and shoulders from a lexicon 
by an advertising tradesman to puff his wares, every slip-slop 
Gallicism from the shelves of the circulating library ; if we 
persist in yoking Hamlets of adjectives to Hecubas of nouns, 
the noble English tongue will become, fifty years hence, a 
mere dialect of colonial idioms, enervated ultramontanisms 
and literate slang. The fertility of a language may degenerate 
into the feculence of weeds and tares : should we not rather, 
instead of raking and heaping together worthless novelties 
of expression, endeavour to weed, to expurgate, to epurate ; 
to render, once more, wholesome and pellucid that which 
was once a " well of English undefiled," and rescue it from 
the sewerage of verbiage and slang ? The Thames is to be 
purified ; why not the language ? Should we not, instead 
of dabbling and dirtying the stream, endeavour to imitate 
those praiseworthy men of letters who, at Athens, in that 
most miserable and forlorn capital of the burlesque kingdom 
of Greece have laboured, and successfully laboured, in the 
face of discountenance, indifference, ignorance, and a foreign 
court, to clear the Greek language from the barbarisms of 
words and phrases, Venetian, Genoese, French, Lingua 
Franca, Arabic, Turkish, Armenian, Spanish, Sclavonic, and 
Teutonic, which, in the course of successive centuries of 
foreign domination and oppression, had crept into it; and 
now (though in the columns of base-priced newspapers, 
printed on rotten paper with broken type) give the debates 
of a venal chamber, and the summary of humdrum passing 
events, in the language of Plato and Socrates. These men 
have done more good and have raised a more enduring 
monument to the genius of their country, than if they 
had reared again every column of the Acropolis, or brought 
back every fragment of the Elgin marbles from Great Russell 
Street, Bloomsbury. 

It is no excuse for this word-sinning of ours to say, that we 



SLANG. 33 

have learnt a great portion of our new-fangled names and 
expressions from America. The utterer is as bad as the 
coiner. It is true that our trans-atlantic cousins have 
not only set us the example, but have frequently surpassed 
us in their eagerness to coin new words, and to apply 
names to things with which they have not the remotest 
relation. The Americans call New York the "empire city," 
as if a city — and in a republic moreover — could be under any 
circumstances an empire. Another town of theirs is the 
"crescent city," and so fond of the name of city are they, that 
they frequently apply it to a group of half-a-dozen log cabins 
and a whiskey shop in a marsh, on the banks of some muddy, 
fever-haunted river. Every speculator in " town lots " (slang 
again) in the States has founded half-a-dozen such "cities." 

In the United States if half-a-dozen newspaper editors, 
post-masters, and dissenting ministers, two or three revolvers, 
a bowie knife, a tooth-pick, and a plug of tobacco get together 
in the bar room of an hotel, the meeting is forthwith called a 
"caucus" or a "mass-meeting." If JoelJ. Wainwright blows 
out General Zebedee Ruffle's brains on the New Orleans levee, it 
is not murder but a "difficulty." In South America, if a score 
of swarthy outlaws — calling themselves generals and colonels, 
and who were muleteers the week before — meet in an out- 
house to concert the assassination of the dictator of the 
republic, (who may have been the landlord of a venta or a hide 
jobber a year ago,) the ragged conclave calls itself a "pro- 
nunciamento." 

And touching the use of the terms, "monster," "mammoth," 
"leviathan," how very trying have those misplaced words be- 
come ! Their violent transformation from substantives into adj ec- 
tives is the least of their wrongs ; the poor harmless animals 
have been outraged in a hundred ways besides. The monster, I 
believe, first became acquainted with a meeting in connection 
with that great agitator, so calm now in Glasnevin cemetery, 
and whose agitation has been followed by such a singular tran- 
quillity and apathy in the land he agitated. As something 
possibly, but not necessarily expressing hugeness (for the 
most diminutive objects may be monstrous) the term of 
monster was not inapplicable. But in a very few months 
every re-union of four-and-twenty fiddlers in a row was dubbed 



34 SLANG. 

a monster concert; a loaf made with, a double allowance of 
dough, was a monster loaf; every confectioner's new year's 
raffle was a monster twelfth cake ; we had monster slop-selling 
shops, and the monster pelargonium drove our old familiar 
friend, the enormous gooseberry, from the field. Then came 
the mammoth. An American speculator — who in the days 
when spades were spades, would have been called a showman, 
but who called himself a "professor and a tiger king," 
neither of which he was — had a horse, some hands above the 
ordinary standard of horseflesh, and forthwith called him the 
mammoth horse. That obsolete animal the Mammoth being 
reputed to have been of vast dimensions, gave to the horse 
this new nickname ; but in a short time there started up from 
all quarters of the Anglo-Saxon globe, from the sky, the earth, 
and from the waters under the earth, a plethora of mammoths. 
The wretched antediluvian beast was made to stand godfather to 
unnumbered things that crawled, and things that crept, and 
things that had life, and things that had not. The mammoth 
caves of Kentucky howled from across the Atlantic. Peaceable 
tradesmen hung strange signs and wonders over their shop 
doors ; and we heard of mammoth dust pans, and mammoth 
loo tables, and mammoth tea trays. Large conger eels, fruits 
of unusual growth, and cheeses made considerably larger than 
was convenient, were exhibited in back streets at sixpence a 
head, under the false pretence of being mammoths. If any- 
body made anything, or saw anything, or wrote anything big, 
it became a mammoth, that the credulous might suppose the 
Titans, Anak and all his sons, were come again, and that 
there were giants in the land. We wait patiently for a 
plesiosaurus pumpkin, or an ichthyosaurus hedgehog ; and we 
shall have them in good time, together with leviathan lap- 
dogs, behemoth butterflies, and great-sea-serpent parliamentary 
speeches. 

Brigands, burglars, beggars, impostors, and swindlers will 
have their slang jargon to the end of the chapter. Mariners, 
too, will use the terms of their craft, and mechanics will 
borrow from the technical vocabulary of their trade. And 
there are cant words and terms traditional in schools and 
colleges, and in the playing of games, which are orally autho- 
rised if not set down in written lexicography. But so 



SLANG. 35 

universal has the use of slang terms become, that in all 
societies, they are frequently substituted for, and have almost 
usurped the place of wit. An audience will sit in a theatre 
and listen to a string of brilliant witticisms, with perfect im- 
mobility; but let some fellow rush forward and roar out 
"It's all serene," or " Catch 'em alive, oh ! " (this last is sure 
to take) pit, boxes, and gallery roar with laughter. 

I cannot find much tendency to the employment of slang in 
the writings of our early humorists. Setting aside obsolete 
words and phrases rendered obscure by involution, there are 
not a hundred incomprehensible terms in all Shakspeare's 
comedies. The glut of commentators to the paucity of dis- 
puted words is the best evidence of that. We can appreciate 
the humour of Butler, the quaintness of Fuller, the satire of 
Dryden, the wit of Congreve and Wycherly, nay, even the 
scurrilities of Mr. Tom Brown, as clearly as though they had 
been written yesterday. In Swift's Polite Conversation, 
among all the homely and familiar sayings there is no slang ; 
and you may be sure, if there had been any of that commodity 
floating about in polite circles then, the Dean would have 
been the man to dish it up for posterity. Fielding and 
Smollett, in all their pictures of life, with all their coarseness 
and indecency, put little slang into the mouths of their 
characters. Even Mr. Jonathan Wild the great, who, from 
his position and antecedents, must have been a master of slang 
in every shape, makes but little use of it in his conversation. 
And in that rogue's epic — that biograpJiia flagitiosa — the 
Beggars' Opera — we can understand Macheath, Filch, Jenny 
Diver, and Mat of the Mint without dictionary or glossary. 
The only man who wrote slang was Mr. Ned Ward; but that 
worthy cannot be taken as an exemplar of the polite, or even 
of the ordinary conversation of his day. 

It may be objected to me, that although there may be a 
large collection of slang words floating about, they are made 
use of only by loose, or at best illiterate persons, and are 
banished from refined society. This may be begging the 
question, . but I deny the truth of the objection. If words 
not to be found in standard dictionaries, not authorised by 
writings received as classics, and for which no literary or 
grammatical precedents can be adduced, are to be called slang 

t>2 



36 SLANG. 

— I will aver that you shall not read one single parliamentary 
debate as reported in a first-class newspaper, without meet- 
ing with scores of slang words. Whatever may be the claims 
of the Commons' House to collective wisdom, it is as a whole 
an assembly of educated gentlemen. From Mr. Speaker in 
his chair to the Cabinet ministers whispering behind it — from 
mover to seconder, from true blue protectionist to extremest 
radical, Mr. Barry's New House echoes and re-echoes with 
slang. You may hear slang every day in term from barristers 
in their robes, at every mess table, at every bar mess, at 
every college commons, in every club dining-room. 

Thus, with great modesty and profound submission, I must 
express my opinion, either that slang should be proscribed, 
banished, prohibited, or that a New Dictionary should be 
compiled, in which all the slang terms now in use among 
educated men, and made use of in publications of established 
character, should be registered, etymologised, explained, and 
stamped with the lexicographic stamp, that we may have 
chapter and verse, mint and hall-mark for our slang. Let the 
new dictionary contain a well-digested array of the multitude 
of synonyms for familiar objects floating about ; let them give 
a local habitation and a name to all the little bye-blows of 
language skulking and rambling about our speech, like the 
ragged little Bedouins about our shameless streets, and give 
them a settlement and a parish. If the evil of slang has 
grown too gigantic to be suppressed, let us at least give it 
decency by legalising it; else, assuredly, this age will be 
branded by posterity with the shame of jabbering a broken 
dialect in preference to speaking a nervous and dignified 
language ; and our wits will be sneered at and undervalued 
as mere word- twisters, who supplied the lack of humour by 
a vulgar facility of low language. 

The compiler of such a dictionary would have no light 
task. I can imagine him at work in the synonymous depart- 
ment. Only consider what a vast multitude of equivalents 
the perverse ingenuity of our slanginess has invented for the 
one generic word Money. Money — the bare, plain, simple 
word itself — has a sonorous, significant ring in its sound, 
and might have sufficed, yet we substitute for it — tin, rhino, 
blunt, rowdy, stumpy, dibbs, browns, stuff, ready, mopusses, 



SLANG. 37 

shiners, dust, chips, clunkers, pewter, horsenails, brads. 
Seventeen synonyms to one word ; and then we come to 
species — pieces of money. Sovereigns are yellow-boys, 
cooters, quids ; crown-pieces are bulls and cart-wheels ; shil- 
lings, bobs, or benders; sixpenny-pieces are fiddlers and 
tizzies ; fourpenuy-pieces, joeys or bits ; pence, browns, or 
coppers and mags. To say that a man is without money, or 
in poverty, some persons remark that he is down on his luck, 
hard up, stumped up, in Queer Street, under a cloud, up a 
tree, quisby, done up, sold up, in a fix. To express that he is 
rich, we say that he is warm, comfortable, that he has 
feathered his nest, that he has lots of tin, or that he has 
plenty of stuff, or is worth a plum. 

For the one word drunk, besides the authorised synonyms 
tipsy, inebriated, intoxicated, I find of unauthorised or slang 
equivalents the astonishing number of thirty- two ; viz., in 
liquor, disguised therein, lushy, bosky, buffy, boozy, mops 
and brooms, half-seas-over, far-gone, tight, not able to see a 
hole through a ladder, three sheets in the wind, foggy, screwed, 
hazy, sewed up, mooney, muddled, muzzy, swipey, lumpy, 
obfuscated, muggy, beery, winey, slewed, on the ran-tan, on 
the re-raw, groggy, ploughed, cut, and in his cups. 

For one article of drink, gin, we have ten synonyms ; max, 
juniper, gatter, duke, jackey, tape, blue-ruin, cream of the 
valley, white satin, old Tom. 

Synonymous with a man, are a cove, a chap, a cull, an 
article, a codger, a buffer. A gentleman is a swell, a nob, 
a tiptopper ; a low person is a snob, a sweep, and a scurf, 
and in Scotland a gutter-blood. Thieves are prigs, cracks- 
men, mouchers, gonophs, go-alongs. To steal is to prig, to 
pinch, to collar, to nail, to grab, to nab. To go or run 
away is to hook it, to bolt, to take tracks, to absquatulate, 
to slope, to step it, to mizzle, to paddle, to cut, to cut your 
stick, to evaporate, to vamose, to be off, to vanish, and to 
tip your rags a gallop. For the verb to beat I can at once 
find fourteen synonyms : thus, to thrash, to lick, to leather, 
to hide, to tan, to larrup, to wallop, to pummel, to whack, to 
whop, to towel, to maul, to quilt, to pay. A horse is a nag, 
a prad, a tit, a screw. A donkey is a moke, a neddy. A 
policeman is a peeler, a bobby, a crusher ; a soldier a swaddy, 



38 SLANG. 

a lobster, a red herring. To pawn is to spout, to pop, to 
lumber, to blue. The bands are mauleys, and tbe fingers 
nippers. The feet are steppers ; the boots crabshells, or trotter 
cases, or grabbers. Food is grub, prog, and crug ; a hackney 
cab is a shoful; a Punch's show a schwassle-box ; a five 
pound note is a flimsy ; a watch a ticker ; anything of good 
quality or character is stunning, ripping, out-and-out; a 
magistrate is a beak, and a footman a flunkey. Not less can 
I set down as slang the verbiage by which coats are trans- 
formed into bis-uniques, alpacas, vicunas, ponchos, anaxan- 
drians, and siphonias. 

The slang expressions I have herein set down I have 
enumerated, exactly as they have occurred to me, casually. 
If I had made research, or taxed my memory for any consider- 
able time, I have no doubt that I could augment the slang 
terms and synonyms to at least double their amount. And it 
is possible that an accomplished public will be able to supply 
from their own recollection and experience a goodly addition 
to my list. The arrival of every mail, the extension of every 
colony, the working of every Australian mine would swell it. 
Placers, squatters, diggers, clearings, nuggets, cradles, claims 
— where were all these words a dozen years ago ? and what 
are they, till they are marshalled in a dictionary, but slang ? 
We may say the same of the railway phraseology : buffers, 
switches, points, stokers, and coal bunks — whence is their 
etymology, and whence their authority ? 

But slang does not end here. It goes higher — to the very 
top of the social Olympus. If the Duchess of Downderry invites 
some dozen of her male and female fashionable acquaintances 
to tea and a dance afterwards, what do you think she calls her 
tea-party ? A the dansant — a dancing tea. Does tea dance ? 
Can it dance? Is not this libel upon honest Bohea and 
Souchong slang? — pare, unadulterated, unmitigated slang. 

The slang of the fashionable world is mostly imported from 
France ; an unmeaning gibberish of Gallicisms runs through 
English fashionable conversation, and fashionable novels, and 
accounts of fashionable parties in the fashionable news- 
papers. Yet, ludicrously enough, immediately the fashionable 
magnates of England seize on any French idiom, the French 
themselves not only universally abandon it to us, but positively 



SLANG. 39 

repudiate it altogether from their idiomatic vocabulary. If 
you were to tell a well-bred Frenchman that such and such 
an aristocratic marriage was on the tapis, he would stare with 
astonishment, and look down on the carpet in the startled 
endeavour to find a marriage in so unusual a place. If you 
were to talk to him.of the beau monde, he would imagine you 
meant the world which God made, not half-a-dozen streets 
and squares between Hyde Park Corner and Chelsea Bun 
House. The the dansant would be completely inexplicable to 
him. If you were to point out to him the Dowager Lady 
Grimgumn acting as chaperon to Lady Amanda Creamville, 
he would imagine you were referring to the petit Chaperon 
Rouge — to little Red Riding Hood. He might just understand 
what was meant by vis-a-vis, entremets, and some others of the 
flying horde of frivolous little foreign slangisms hovering 
about fashionable cookery and fashionable furniture ; but 
three-fourths of them would seem to him as barbarous French 
provincialisms, or, at best, but as antiqmted and obsolete 
expressions picked up out of the letters of Mademoiselle 
Scuderi, or the tales of Crebillon the younger. 

But, save us, your ladyship, there are thousands of English- 
men who might listen to your ladyship for an hour without 
understanding half-a-dozen words of your discourse. When 
you speak of the last faux pas, of poor Miss Limberfoot's sad 
mesalliance, of the Reverend Mr. Caudlecup's being " so full 
of soul," of the enchanting roulades of that ravishing canta 
trice Martinuzzi, of your dinner of the day before being 
recherche, of your gens being insolent and inattentive, how 
shall plain men refrain from staring wonderstruck at your 
unfathomable discourse ? 

And when your ladyship does condescend to speak English, 
it is only with a delightful mincingness of accent and a liberal 
use of superlatives. The Italian singer you heard last night 
was a "divine creature;" if you are slightly tired or dull 
you are " awfully bored" or " devoured with ennui;" if your 
face be pale you vow you are a " perfect fright ; " if a gentle- 
man acquaintance volunteer a very mild joke he is a " quizzi- 
cal monster" — a dreadful quiz, he is so awfully satirical; and 
the comic actor last night was "killing;" and Julie, my 
child, hand me my vinaigrette, and take a shilling out of 



40 SLANG. 

my porte-monnaie, and tell Adolfe to get some jujubes for 
Fido ; and, let me see, if I go out in the pilentum to-day, 
or stay, the barouche (we have a char-a-banc down at our 
place, Doctor), I will wear my moire antique and my ruche 
of Brussels lace, and my mantelet, and my chatelaine, with all 
the "charms" Lord Bruin Fitzurse brought me from Dresden, 
and then we will take a drive in the Park, and I will leave a 
card at Bojannee Loll's for my next " Thursday," for really, 
my dear, " lions " are so scarce now, that even Bojannee Loll 
will be an acquisition : and so on. 

I believe the abominable slang practice of writing P. P.O. 
on a card of leave-taking, and R.S.V.P. at the bottom of a 
letter when you wish an answer to it, is gone out of fashion, 
and I rejoice that it has. 

Young Lord Fitzurse speaks of himself and of his aristo- 
cratic companions as " fellows " (very often pronounced 
" fay wows"); if he is going to drive a four-horse coach 
down to Epsom Races, he is going to " tool his drag down to 
the Derby." Lord Bobby Bobbins' s great coat, which he 
admires, is " down the road." An officer in the tenth 
hussars is " a man in the tenth;" a pretty young lady is a 
"neat little filly ;" a vehicle which is not a drag (or dwag) 
is a " trap " or a " cask ; " his Lordship's lodgings in Jermyn 
Street are his " crib," his "diggings," or he "hangs out" 
there. His father is his "governor;" his bill-discounter a 
"dreadful old screw," if he refuses to do a "bit of stiff" for 
him. When his friend has mortgaged his estate, he pro- 
nounces it to be " dipped." Everything that pleases him 
is "crushing, by' Jove!" everything that displeases him 
(from bad sherry to a writ from his tailor) is "infernal." 

Then there is the slang of criticism. Literary, dramatic, 
artistic, and scientific. Such words as sesthetic, transcen- 
dental, the " harmonies," the unities, a myth : such phrases 
as an exquisite morceau on the big drum, a scholarlike ren- 
dering of John the Baptist's great toe; "keeping," "harmony," 
"middle-distance," "aerial perspective," "delicate handling," 
" nervous chiaroscuro," and the like, are made use of pell- 
mell, without the least relation to their real meanings, their 
real uses, their real requirements. 

And the stage has its slang, both before and behind the 



SLANG. 41 

curtain. Actors speak of such, and such a farce being- a 
" screamer," and such and such a tragedy being " damned " 
or " goosed." If an actor forgets his part while on the 
stage, he is said to "stick " and to " corpse " the actors who 
may be performing with him, by putting them out in their 
parts. A "part" has so many "lengths;" a piece will 
" run " so many nights. Belville is going in the country to 
" star " it. When no salaries are forthcoming on Saturday, 
the " ghost doesn't walk " — a benefit is a " ben," a salary a 
"sal;" an actor is not engaged to play tragedy or comedy, 
but to "do the heavy business," or " second low comedy," 
and when he is out of an engagement he is said to be " out 
of collar." 

Thus through all grades and professions of life runs this 
omnipresent slang. 

In the immense number of new words which are being con- 
tinually coined and disseminated throughout our gigantic 
periodical press lies, I conceive, the chief difficulty of the 
English language to foreigners. The want of any clear and 
competent authority as to what words are classical and what 
merely slang, what obsolete and what improper, must be a 
source of perpetual tribulation and uncertainty to the un- 
happy stranger. If he is to take Johnson and Walker for 
standards, a walk from Charing Cross to Temple Bar, an hour 
at a theatre, or an evening in society, will flood his perturbed 
tympanum with a deluge of words concerning which Johnson 
and Walker are absolutely mute. How is the foreigner to 
make his election ? Suppose the unfortunate Monsieur, or 
Herr, or Signor should address himself to write as De Lolme 
did, a treatise on the English constitution. Suppose he were 
to begin a passage thus: — "Though Lord Protocol was an 
out-and-out humbug, Sir Reddy Tapewax was not such a flat 
as to be taken in. He proved the gammon of Lord Protocol's 
move, and, though he thought him green, did him completely 
brown." How many young politicians would not think it 
beneath them to talk in this manner, yet how bitterly the 
foreign essayist would be ridiculed for his conversational style 
of composition. 

The French have an Academy of Letters, and the dictionary 
of that Academy, published after forty years' labour, nearly 



42 SLANG. 

two centuries ago, is still the standard model of elegance and 
propriety in composition and conversation. The result of this 
has been, that every work of literary excellence in France 
follows the phraseology, and within very little the ortho- 
graphy which we find in the poetry of Racine and Boileau, 
and the prose of Pascal and Fenelon. And the French has 
become, moreover, the chief diplomatic conversational and 
commercial language in the world. It is current everywhere. 
It is neither so copious, so sonorous, or so dignified as 
English or German, but it is fixed. The Emperor of Russia 
or the Sultan of Turkey may write and speak (accent apart) 
as good French as any Parisian. But in England an Eng- 
lishman even has never done learning his own language. It 
has no rules, no limits; its orthography and pronunciation 
are almost entirely arbitrary ; its words are like a provi- 
sional committee, with power to add to their number. A 
foreigner may hope to read and write English tolerably well, 
after assiduous study ; but he will never speak it without a 
long residence in England ; and even then he will be in no 
better case than the English-bred Englishman, continually 
learning, continually hearing words of whose signification he 
has not the slightest idea, continually perplexed as to what 
should be considered a familiar idiom, and what inadmissible 
slang. 

To any person who devotes himself to literary composition 
in the English language, the redundancy of unauthorised words 
and expressions must always be a source of unutterable annoy- 
ance and vexation. Should he adopt the phraseology and 
style of the authors of the eras of Elizabeth or Anne, he 
may be censured as obsolete or as perversely quaint. Should 
he turn to the Latin tongue for the construction of his phrases 
and the choice of his language, he will be stigmatised as 
pedantic, or with that grave charge of using hard words. 
And, should he take advantage of what he hears and sees in 
his own days and under his own eyes, and incorporate into his 
language those idiomatic words and expressions he gathers 
from the daily affairs of life and the daily conversation of his 
fellow men, he will have no lack of critics to tell him, that he 
writes insufferable vulgarity and slang. Her Majesty Queen 
Anne is dead ; but for her Majesty's decease we should have 



SLANG. 43 

had an Academy of Letters and an Academy Dictionary in 
England. There are two opinions in this country relative 
to the utility of academies ; and, without advocating the for- 
mation of such an institution I may be permitted submissively 
to plead, that we really do want a new dictionaiy — if not in 
justice to ourselves, at least in justice to foreigners, and in 
justice to our great-great-grand-children. 



ALWAYS UNITED. 



As we grope through the mental gloom of the Dark Ages, 
stumbling over the lamentable ruins of libraries and schools, 
and arts, it is sometimes the good fortune of the student to 
see, glittering at his feet, a jewel of price and brilliancy — 
glittering among the crushed and irrecognisable fragments of 
arts gone by, and the gross and clumsy paraphernalia of a 
barbarian epoch. 

As bright a jewel as ever shone in a century of intellectual 
darkness and ignorance was a man admired, revered, beloved, 
hated, followed, celebrated in his own age ; and who has been 
famous to successive ages, and to this age almost universally, 
not for what he had the greatest cause to ground his fame 
upon — for his learning, his eloquence, or his philosophy — but 
for being the hero of one of the most romantic love stories 
the world ever wept at — for being Abelard, the husband of 
Heloise. 

The story of Abelard and Heloise, if it be not universally 
known, is at least universally public. That a thing can be 
the latter without being the former I need only call Dr. Johnson 
(in his criticism on Kenrick) to prove. Every pair of lovers 
throughout the civilised world have heard of Abelard and 
Heloise. They are as familiar in the mouth as Hero and 
Leander, Pyramus and Thisbe, Cupid and Psyche, Darby and 
Joan, Jobson and Nell. Yet beyond their names, and the 
fact that they were lovers, not one person in twenty knows 
much about any of these personages. Every visitor to Paris 
has seen the Gothic tomb of Abelard and Heloise in the cemetery 
of Pere la Ohaise. Every reader of Pope will remember his 
exquisite poetical paraphrase of Heloise' s epistles to Abelard. 
Every student of the urbane and self-devouring Jean-Jacques 



ALWAYS UNITED. 45 

Rousseau has once wept, and now yawns over, the philosophic 
sentimentalities of La Nouvelle Heloise. The names, indeed, 
of these immortal lovers are on the lips of the whole civilised 
world ; bnt of the man Abelard and of the woman Heloise, 
what they really were like, and what they really did and 
suffered, the knowledge of the vast majority of readers is very 
limited indeed. Their renown has been transmitted from cen- 
tury to century with the triple consecration of genius, passion, 
and misfortune ; yet their works have been forgotten, and the 
history of their lives has become a tradition rather than a 
chronicle. 

It is remarkable, as showing how much of our acquaintance 
with the subject of this paper — in England, at least — is purely 
legendary, that in the voluminous catalogue of the library of 
the British Museum there is but one work to be found in 
English concerning Abelard and Heloise ; and this is but a 
trumpery imitation of Pope's poetical version of the letters. 
Scattered through the various biographical dictionaries are 
sundry meagre notices of Abelard and his spouse. These are 
all founded upon the only English work of importance on this 
topic that I have been enabled to meet with (and the Museum 
does not possess it) : " The History of the lives of Abeillard 
and Heloisa, by the Reverend Joseph Berrington : Basle, 1793." 
This is an excellent book, containing, in addition to the bio- 
graphy, sensible translations of the Hisioria calamitatum of 
Abelard, and of Heloise's letters ; but the good clergyman has 
not thought it worth his while to consult the authorities con- 
temporary with his hero and heroine ; and has, in writing 
their lives, taken for granted as historical and authentic all 
the romantic figments of a certain clerical rascal, one Dom 
Gervaise, formerly a Trappist, but who had been drummed 
out of that austere society; and who, in 1720, published a 
" History of Peter Abeillard, Abbot of St. Gildas, and of 
Eloisa his wife." This work was interesting and piquant 
certainly ; but in it the plain facts of the case were, for purely 
bookselling purposes, overlaid with a farrago of romance and 
legendary gossip. However, Mr. Berrington's well-meaning 
quarto, and the dictionary memoirs founded upon it, together 
with Pope and his imitator, are all the authorities we can 
muster on this world-known theme. One would imagine that 



46 ALWAYS UNITED. 

the Germans — fond as they are of sentimental metaphysics — 
would have eagerly seized upon the history of Abelard for 
elucidation and disquisition. Yet it will scarcely be credited 
that only three German authors of any note have thought it 
worth while to write at any length about Maitre Pierre and 
his wife. Herr Moritz Carriere has undertaken to elucidate 
Abelard' s system of philosophy ; in which he has done little 
more than translate the remarks of the most recent French 
writers thereupon. Herr Fessler, in the true spirit of a meta- 
physical litterateur, has taken the subject up in the most 
orthodox style of Fog; descanting, and doubting, and re- 
doubting, until the Fog becomes positively impervious ; and 
Abelard disappears entirely within it, leaving nothing before 
the eyes but a hazy mass of black letters sprawling over whitey- 
brown pages, in a stitched cover of blue sugar-paper. The 
third sage, Herr Feuerbach (Leipsic, 1844), is yet bolder in 
his metaphysical obscurity. His book is called "Abelard and 
Helo'ise ; " but, beyond these names dimly impressed on the 
title-page, the beings they stand for are not once mentioned 
again throughout the work, and M. de Remusat conjectures 
that by Abelard and Helo'ise, the foggy Herr means Art and 
Humanity. This is lucus a non lucendo with a vengeance ! 

In France, however, to make amends, the lives and writ- 
ings of this unhappy pair have been a fertile theme for the 
most illustrious of modern French scholars. The accomplished 
Madame Guizot, the academicians Villenave and Philarete- 
Chasles, the erudite Bibliophile Jacob (Paul Lacroix), have 
all written, and written well, on the subject of Maitre Pierre. 
Nor must we forget M. Victor Cousin, who, in 1836, first 
published a work from the pen of Abelard himself, the Sic ei 
non and the Odm Flebiles, or Songs of Lamentation of Abe- 
lard, from a manuscript which had been recently discovered 
in the Vatican library. The earliest of the modern writers 
upon Abelard was the famous and brilliant Bussy-Rabutin ; 
the latest M. Charles de Remusat; who, in 1846, published 
in Paris a voluminous and elaborate work entitled Abelard. 
No ; not the last. M. de Remusat is but the penultimate ; 
for, the great master of philosophical biography, M. Guizot 
himself, has lately entered the lists, and has added his Abelard 
to the distinguished catalogue. 



ALWAYS UNITED. 47 

Yet, with all this, the story of the lives of Abelard and 
Helo'ise remains to be written. Elaborate as M. de Remusat's 
work is, it is more a scholarlike explanation and examina- 
tion of the system of philosophy and theology professed and 
taught by Abelard, than a life-history of the Abbot of St. 
Gildas, and the Abbess of the Paraclete. The field is yet 
open for a history of the lives and adventures, the fortunes 
and misfortunes of Abelard and Heloise ; of Abelard, more 
especially, could his history be separated from that of his 
partner in joy and misery — for Abelard was the glory of his 
age. Far removed above those obscure school-men of the 
Middle Ages whose names are only dimly remembered now 
in connection with some vain polemical dispute, he was a 
poet, a musician, a philosopher, a jurist ; a scholar unrivalled ; 
a dialectician unmatched, a theologian, whose mouth — as his 
adversaries confessed — was only to be closed by blows. His 
profound learning, his commanding eloquence, the charms of 
his conversation, the beauty of his person, the purity of his 
morals — until his fatal passion — made him the delight, and 
wonder, and pride of France, and of Europe. He was the 
only man among crowds of schoolmen and scholiasts, and 
casuists and sciolists who was wise enough to comprehend, 
and bold enough to defend the sublime doctrine of Plato, 
"that God is the seat of ideas, as space is the seat of bodies, 
and that the soul was an emanation of the divine essence, from 
whom it imbibed all its ideas ; but that having sinned, it was 
degraded from its first estate, and condemned to an union with 
the body, wherein it is confined as in a prison ; that its for- 
getfulness of its former ideas was the natural consequence of 
that penalty; and that the benefit of religion consists in 
repairing this loss by gradually leading back the soul to its 
first conceptions." This doctrine, in contra-distinction to the 
ridiculous figments of the Nominalists, and Realists, and Con- 
ceptualists of his age ; this the philosophy of Plato — illus- 
trated by the polemics of Aristotle, enriched by the schools of 
Alexandria, and afterwards matured by Mallebranche, Des- 
cartes, and Leibnitz — was taught by Peter Abelard to thou- 
sands of scholars of every nation in the twelfth century, while 
the Norman Kings of England were laying waste their own 
dominions to make hunting forests for their beasts of venery ; 



48 ALWAYS UNITED. 



. 



while princes and emperors were signing proclamations with, 
their " mark," made by their gauntlet-fingers dipped in ink; 
while the blackest ignorance, the most brutal violence, the 
grossest and most debasing superstition, overran the fairest 
portion of Europe. The friends of Abelard were the noblest 
of the noble ; his admirers the fairest of the fair ; his very- 
adversaries were popes, saints, and martyrs. 

In the year of grace 1118, when Louis the Fat was king 
of the French people, the metropolis was entirely contained 
in that space which at the present day forms one of its smallest 
sections — the Cite of Paris. In this famous island, dividing, 
as all men know, the river Seine into two arms, were con- 
centrated all the grandeurs of the kingdom — the church, the 
royal palace, the law, the schools. These powers had here 
their seat. Two bridges united the island to the two shores of 
the river. The Grand Pont led to the right bank, towards the 
quarter where, between the ancient churches of St. Germain 
1'Auxerrois and St. Gervais, a few foreign merchants had 
begun to settle, attracted by the already considerable renown 
of the Lutetia of the Gauls. Towards the left bank the Petit 
Pont led to the foot of that hill, then, as now, crowned by a 
church dedicated to St. Genevieve, the patroness of Paris. 
The neighbouring meadows or pres (particularly towards the 
foot of the Petit Pont) became gradually frequented by the 
scholars, or students, or clercs, who attended the scholastic con- 
course in the Cite. The number of these noisy and turbulent 
young men, always increasing, soon overflowed the confined 
limits of the Cite. So they crossed the Petit Pont into the 
meadows at the foot of the hill of St. Genevieve — first to play 
and gambol and fight on its pleasant green sward ; afterwards 
— when inns and lodging-houses were built for their accom- 
modation — to dwell in them. Thus, opposite the city of com- 
merce grew up little by little a city of learning ; and, betwixt 
the two, maintained its grim state the city of law and the 
priesthood. The quarter inhabited by the students came soon | 
to be denominated le Pays Latin, and it is thus called to the 
day I write in. 

In the Cite, opposite to the sovereign's palace — where in 
those days the sovereign himself administered justice, and 
where in these days justice is yet administered in his name — 



ALWAYS UNITED. 49 

stood tlie great metropolitan church of Notre Dame ; and, 
around it, were ranged fifteen other churches, like soldiers 
guarding their queen. Notre Dame, or at least the successor 
of the first Basilica, yet frowns over the Cite in massive im- 
mensity ; but, of the fifteen churches, not one vestige remains. 
Here, in the shadows of these churches and of the cathedral ; 
in dusky cloisters ; in sombre halls ; upon the shadowy lawns 
of high-walled gardens, went and came a throng of students 
of all degrees, of all occupations, of all nations. The fame 
of the schools of Paris drew towards them (as in one depart- 
ment, medicine, they do still) scholars from every land on the 
face of the yet discovered globe. ' Here, amidst the confu- 
sions of costumes, and ranks, and languages, and ages, glided 
solemn priests and sage professors. Above them all, pre- 
eminent, unrivalled, unquestioned in his intellectual sovereignty, 
moved a man in the prime of life, with a broad and massive 
forehead, a proud and piercing glance, a manly gait, whose 
beauty yet preserved the brilliancy of youth, while admitting 
to participate with it the deeper hues of maturity. The 
simple elegance of his manners, alternately affable and haughty, 
an imposing yet graceful presence ; the respectful curiosity of 
the multitudes whom he did not know, the enthusiastic admi- 
ration of the multitudes he did know, who hung upon his 
words, all announced in him the most powerful in the schools, 
the most illustrious in the land, the most beloved in the Cite. 
Old men uncovered as he passed ; women at the doors held 
out their little children to him ; maidens above drew aside the 
curtains from their latticed casements, and blushingly glanced 
downwards towards him. The men and the children all 
pressed to see, and stretched their necks to hear, and shouted 
when they had seen and heard Maitre Pierre — the famous 
Abelard — as he went by. 

He was now thirty-nine years old. He was the son of 
Beranger, the seigneur of his native place, Pallet, near Nantes 
in Brittany, where he was born in the year 1079. He was 
the eldest son ; but, no sooner had the time arrived for him 
to choose a profession, than, eschewing arms — the profession 
I of every seigneur's eldest born — he openly avowed his pre- 
ference for letters and philosophy. He abandoned his birth- 
. right to his brothers, and returned to his studies with renewed 



50 ALWAYS UNITED. 



could 
loved 



assiduity. He had soon mastered all, and more than he coulc 
he taught in the schools of Brittany, and accordingly remove 
to the University of Paris ; where he studied under William 
of Champeaux, afterwards bishop of Chalons -sur-Marne, and 
who subsequently became a monk of Citeaux. This reverent 
man was the most renowned dialectician of his time, but he 
soon found a rival, and next a master, in Abelard. Warm 
friends at first, their friendship changed to the bitterest enmity : 
a public quarrel took place between them, in consequence of 
which Abelard removed from Paris, first to Melun and next 
to Corbeil ; in both of which retreats he was followed by 
crowds of admiring and enthusiastic scholars. After a sojourn 
for the benefit of his health in his native Brittany, he returned 
to Paris, having been absent two years. A reconciliation was 
effected between him and William de Champeaux, and Abe- 
lard next opened a school of rhetoric. It speedily became the 
most famous school in Europe. Of this school were Guy de 
Chatel, afterwards cardinal and pope under the title of Celes- 
tine the Second ; Peter Lombard, bishop of Paris ; Godefroye, 
bishop of Auxerre ; Berenger, bishop of Poitiers ; and the 
holy abbot of Clairvaux, the great St. Bernard himself. In 
this school Abelard taught logic, metaphysics, physics, mathe- 
matics, astronomy, morals, and philosophy. His lectures were 
attended by all that Paris could boast of nobility, of beauty, 
of learning, and piety. 

If Abelard had died in his golden prime, at thirty-nine 
years of age, it would have been well. But Wisdom had 
decided otherwise. Pride was to be humbled, the mighty 
were to fall, and wisdom and learning were to be a mockery, 
a warning and an example to the meanest. 

It is not my purpose to tell the miserable love story of 
Abelard and Heloise. I wish to treat of Peter Abelard, the 
scholar and the philosopher — of that phase of his character 
which has been obscured and almost extinguished by the 
ghastly brilliancy of his passion for the niece of the Canon 
Fulbert. All who know the names of Abelard and Heloise 
know the tragical history of their loves. 

After his marriage the forlorn, broken, and ruined victim, 
who had once been the renowned Maitre Pierre, retired to the 
Abbey of St. Denis, to hide in the cloister his misery and his 



ALWAYS UNITED. 51 

remorse. He became a Benedictine Monk. Previous to his 
incloistration, however, he prevailed upon Helo'ise to take 
the veil. She obeyed the mandate of him whom she yet loved 
with all the fondness and fervour of their first fatal passion ; 
but she did so with a breaking heart. The cloister was a 
refuge to Abelard ; to Heloise it was a tomb. Young (not 
twenty years old), beautiful, accomplished, she felt her life in 
every limb — she saw herself condemned to a living death. 
She who had pictured to herself a life of refined luxury and 
splendour ; of being, perchance, with him to whom she had 
given her whole heart, the ornament of courts and cities, had 
before her the dreary prospect of a life-long dungeon. 

The sojourn of Abelard in the Abbey of St. Denis was not 
long and not happy. Now that his glory was departed ; that 
his reputation for sanctity and purity of manners was tarnished ; 
those who had long been his enemies, but whose carpings and 
croakings had been rendered inaudible by the trumpet voice of 
his eloquence, arose in numbers around him, and attacked him 
with that persevering ferocity which malignant cowards only 
possess. He was assaulted by the weakest and most con- 
temptible. The most ignorant monks of the ignorant brother- 
hood of Saint Denis hastened in their presumption to challenge 
his arguments and to question his orthodoxy. He was accused 
of heresy, of deism, of pantheism, of Arianism — of a host of 
doctrinal crimes, and eventually expelled the order. The 
dispute which led to his removal or rather expulsion from St. 
Denis was as ridiculous as it was savagely pursued, and its 
relation will serve to show the futilities of monastic erudition 
i in the days of Abelard. 

One day as Maitre Pierre was reading the Commentary of the 
Venerable Bede upon the Acts of the Apostles, he came to a pas- 
sage in which the holy commentator stated that Denis the Areo- 
pagite was bishop of Corinth, and not of Athens. Now the 
founder of the abbey of St. Denis (the saint with his head under 
his arm) was, according to the showing of his own "Gesta," 
bishop of Athens ; and according to the monks of St. Denis he 
was also that same Areopagite whom St. Paul converted. Abe- 
lard quoted Bede to show that the Areopagite was bishop of 
Corinth; the monks opposed their authority, one Hilduin, who 
had been abbot of St. Denis in the reign of Louis le Debon- 

e 2 



52 ALWAYS UNITED. 

naire. Maitre Pierre contemptuously replied that lie could 
not think of allowing the testimony of an ignorant friar to 
weigh against that of a writer who was revered for his learn- 
ing and piety by princes, and kings, and pontiffs. This so 
enraged the monks that they complained to the king and to 
the archbishop of Paris. They drew down upon the unfortu- 
nate Abelard royal reproofs and ecclesiastical censures ; and, 
not content with this, they positively scourged him as a heretic 
and blasphemer ! 

New troubles were yet to come. A book he had written, 
called The Introduction to Theology, was declared by his 
enemies to be full of heresies. He was cited before the Coun- 
cil of Soissons, badgered with interrogatories, threatened, 
rebuked; and was compelled to burn the obnoxious book with 
his own hands. It is upon record that Abelard wept. It 
must have been no ordinary sorrow to have brought the tears 
welling from the eyes of the stern philosopher. Love and 
pride and his good name among men lay all a-bleeding. A 
hangman's brazier and a hangman's office were all the rewards 
of long years of patient study and research and soul-engross- 
ing meditation. The glory of the schools, the master of 
masters, was reduced to the level of* a convicted libeller; 
lashed like a hound, driven forth from among his fellow men 
like a Leper or a Pariah. 

Hunted about . from place to place ; pursued by mandates, 
censures and decrees; without shelter, without resources, 
almost without bread, Abelard hid himself in a solitude near 
Troyes. Here, in a barren and desolate heath, he built with 
his own hands a wretched hovel of mud and wattles. This 
hovel was afterwards to become the Paraclete. 

Unable to dig, ashamed to beg, yet compelled to seek some 
means of subsistence, Abelard commenced expounding the 
Scriptures for his daily bread. He soon gathered round him 
a considerable body of scholars. Before long their number 
amounted to upwards of three thousand ! Some rays of his 
ancient glories seemed to return to him. From the fees he 
received from his scholars, he was enabled to build a chapel 
and convent, which he dedicated to the Holy Trinity. But his 
enemies were indefatigable. The dedication was declared 
heretical ; and, to appease his adversaries, Abelard changed 



ALWAYS UNITED. 53 

the name of his convent to that of the Paraclete or Consola- 
tion. When, at length, wearied with continual disputes and 
vexations, Abelard accepted the Abbacy of St. Gildas-des- 
Rhuys in the diocese of Vannes, he signified to Heloise his 
desire that she should take possession of the Paraclete with 
her nuns. Her learning and renown had already elevated her 
to be the Abbess of the convent of Argenteuil, in which 
Abelard had placed her, but Suger, the Abbot of St. Denis, 
had laid a claim against the lands and buildings attached to it ; 
and she accordingly availed herself of the asylum provided for 
her by Abelard. 

Abelard was not happy in his new position. He found 
himself in a barbarous district. His convent was rudely 
built and scantily furnished. His monks were dissolute and 
insubordinate. When he endeavoured to rebuke their excesses, 
and to reform their way of life, he was met with taunts of 
the scandals of his past life. Yet here he remained during 
many years ; and here he composed the pathetic poems called 
the Oda F/ebiles — the Songs of Weeping ; in which, under a 
thin vein of biblical fiction, he poured forth his own unutterable 
woes. Here he received, after the silence of years, those 
impassioned letters from Heloise, which will be read and wept 
over in all time. He replied to her ; but in a stiff, constrained 
and frigid tone. The man's heart was dead within him. His 
misery was so immense that the selfishness of his grief can be 
pardoned. To the expressions of endearment, the written 
caresses that reached o'er hundreds of leagues, he could only 
return philosophic injunctions to resignation, and devout 

■ maxims and discourses. He was her " best beloved," her 
"life." She was his "dear sister in the Lord." He took 

: considerable interest in the prosperity of the Paraclete. He 

■ framed a rule of discipline for the guidance of the sisterhood y 
'■ he- even visited the Paraclete. After several years, Abelard 

• saw Heloise again. He was no longer Abelard ; but the 
i abbot of St. Gildas : she no longer Heloise, but the abbess of 

the Paraclete. There were visitations, benedictions and ser- 

• mons ; and so they met and so they parted. 

i His enemies again renewed their attacks — his heresies were 
again brought against him. A great ecclesiastical council was 
held at Sens, before which Abelard was summoned. There, 



54 ALWAYS UNITED. 

Ms principal adversary was the abbot of Clairvaux, the great 
St. Bernard. He was held up to execration as an abbot 
without monks, without morals, without faith; as a married 
friar ; as the hero of a disgraceful amour. St. Bernard com- 
pared him to Arius — to Nestorius — to Pelagius. He was 
folly condemned. His life was threatened. He appealed to 
Home. " Shall he who denies Peter's faith take refuge behind 
Peter's chair?" exclaimed St. Bernard. His appeal was at 
length ungraciously allowed, and he set out for Rome. But 
©n his way thither, " weary and old of service," he was in- 
duced to accept the asylum offered him by Peter the Venerable 
in the monastery of Cluny. There, in prayer and mortifica- 
tion, he passed the brief remaining time he had yet to live. 
And in the priory of St. Marcel — an establishment dependent 
upon the monastery of Cluny — Peter Abelard died in the year 
1142, being then sixty-three years old. Heloise survived him 
twenty-one years. Their son, Astrolabius, survived his father 
but not his mother. He died a monk. 

The remains of Abelard were, in the first instance, interred 
at St. Marcel. They were reclaimed by Heloise ; and, the 
reclamation having been allowed by Peter the Venerable, the 
corpse was removed to the Paraclete, where it was buried. 
The tradition runs, that when Heloise died, her body was 
deposited in the same tomb; and that, as the corpse was 
lowered into the vault, the skeleton of the dead Abelard 
opened its arms to receive her. The truth, however, is that 
they were not at first buried together. It was not till 1497 that 
Catherine de Courcelles, seventeenth abbess of the Paraclete, 
caused their remains to be placed in one coffin. This double 
coffin was discovered and exhumed at the French Revolution ; 
and the popular fury which destroyed the convent of the 
*Paraclete respected the bones of Abelard and Heloise. After 
many changes of domicile, the bones were removed in the 
year 1800 to the garden of the Museum of French monuments 
in Paris. Hence, in 1817, they were finally removed to the 
cemetery of Pere la Chaise, where they were placed beneath a 
monument formed from the ruins of the Paraclete. Their 
names are alternately engraved on the plinth, together with 
these Greek words :— AEI STMnEnAErMENOI, or Always 
United. 



LIBERTY, EQUALITY, FRATERNITY, 
AND MUSKETRY. 



We were three Englishmen travelling by the mail-train 
from London to Dover, on our way to Paris, one evening in 
the month of December, 1851. The extensive horse-dealer 
in the multiplicity of thick great coats — the quiet Cambridge 
man reading a shilling reprint of Macaulay — and the present 
writer — did not find the eighty miles or so, lying between 
London Bridge and the Custom House Quay at Dover, hang 
at all heavy on their hands. There was a thick white fog 
outside, and a trifle of drizzling rain, and enough frost to 
make the rails slippery; but we were as jovial, notwithstand- 
ing, as old travellers ought to be. The horse-dealer talked 
voluminously of divers " parties" having a knowledge of 
"little mares;" and told us, quite confidentially, that he 
intended to put the brown horse in harness next week. The 
Cantab discoursed of "men" who were going "up" to the 
University; of Brown of "Maudlin" wineing somewhat too 
copiously with Jones of Trinity ; of how Muffle beat the 
Bargee, and how Snaffle of Trinity had been chased four miles 
through ploughed fields by a determined proctor, anxious to 
ascertain his name and college. As to the scribe, he passed 
no inconsiderable portion of the time in endeavouring to pull 
a pair of worsted stockings over his boots ; in talking a little, 
sleeping a little, and reading a little for a change. 

Now, on the Tuesday immediately preceding the eve of our 
journey, there had been an intricate political evolution per- 
formed in Paris, called a coup-d'etat. People have grown so 
accustomed to revolutions, that they took this last revolution 
very quietly; expecting, doubtless, reciprocal tranquillity on the 
other side of the Channel. There was a harvest of the evening 
papers, a run of luck for the gossips, an ill wind blowing 
some considerable good to the "patterers " who pervaded the 
fashionable squares until a late hour, proclaiming, with 



56 LIBERTY, EQUALITY, FRATERNITY, AND MUSKETRY. 

sonorous solemnity, Paris in flames, the red flag waving, and 
the President assassinated. 

We went about our business, however, veiy comfortably 
and quietly, crossed the Channel, and started from Boulogne 
with the mail-bags and a locomotive post-office, at two in the 
morning of Thursday, seeing nothing of revolution, and 
nothing of arms or an army, save one very imposing gendarme 
— a prize gendarme, with a wonderful cocked hat, a beard 
and moustache most martial, a sword prodigiously long, and 
calculated, generally, to strike terror into the disaffected, and 
to awe the malcontents. But, as I had seen him in the same 
marvellous costume several times before (I even think I can 
remember him before they changed the uniform, and when he 
wore jack-boots and leathers), and as I know him to be a 
peaceful warrior, willing, when off duty, to partake of a verre 
a anisette or Cassis with you, I did not argue, even from his 
grande tenue. any very alarming state of things. 

The stations, as in the grey dawn we were whirled past 
them, were all filled with soldiers. This had an ugly look. 
My co- occupants of the carriage made various manifestations. 
The pretty traveller from America began to get frightened ; — 
a pretty girl in a pretty bonnet; showing, as subsequent 
events disclosed, a prettier face. She had a large fur mantle, 
and a soft voice with a slight lisp, had come straight from 
New Orleans to New York, from New York to Liverpool, from 
Liverpool to London, and so, by this mail, to Paris, alone. 
Come ! The world is not so bad as some would accuse it of 
being, when a timid girl, not twenty years of age, can travel 
so many thousands of miles, and talk with a smile of travelling 
back again, when she has seen her friends in Paris ! 

The horse-dealer, the Cantab, the writer, and, I grieve to 
say, the disagreeable gentleman with the seal-skin cap, made 
divers futile attempts to sleep, and many more successful to 
converse from Paris to Lille. In the carriage, likewise, was a 
very large cloak, which, partially disclosing a despatch box, 
and a button with a crown on it, I conjectured to form a 
portion of a sleeping Queen's messenger. 

So, in the cold foggy morning, past Beauvais, Clermont, 
Creil, St. Denis ; and, by nine o'clock, into the Paris 
terminus. 



LIBERTY, EQUALITY, FRATERNITY, AND MUSKETRY. 57 

The look of things in general assumed an uglier appear- 
ance. The dwarfish little soldiers, with their shabby great 
coats and bright muskets, swarmed in waiting-rooms, refresh- 
ment-rooms, and offices. The gallant officers (why will they 
wear stays?) in baggy trousers promenaded gravely, and 
inspected us suspiciously. Yet no one asked us for passports ; 
the inspection of luggage went on as quietly as usual, and we 
were free to depart. 

Now, I dwell, when in Paris, in a hostelry in the Rue St. 
Honore, close to the church of St. Roch. To reach its hos- 
pitable porte-cochere, one is apt, when tired, sleepy, and 
incumbered— with a carpet-bag, a hat-box, and a great coat 
or two — to take a cab ; and, being resolved to take one, I 
sallied forth into the court-yard of the terminus. There were 
no cabs, no omnibuses, no vehicles of any description. Not 
even a wheelbarrow. Berlines, citadines, fiacres, dames 
blanches, sylphides, coucous, voitures bourgeoises — all the 
multifarious varieties of French equipages, had disappeared. 
The shops were shut, and the streets were apparently deserted, 
though impassable. The truth was, I had stepped into a 
besieged city. 

I asked one of the railway porters where I could get a 
vehicle ? " Monsieur," he replied, very politely, " nowhere." 
Could I walk down the Rue St. Denis, and so by the Boule- 
vards into the Rue St. Honore ? " Monsieur, it is impossible ; 
circulation is impeded." What was I to do? My friend, the 
porter, had got an hour for his breakfast, and he would be 
enchante to carry my bag, and to conduct me to my destination 
by streets where there was no apprehension of disturbance. 

And so we set out. I longed for the most extortionate of 
cabmen. I could have embraced the most insolent of omnibus 
conductors. Tramp, tramp, tramp, through dreadful little 
streets, choked with mud; now, stopped by barricades in 
course of construction or of demolition : now, entangled in a 
mob of the lowest riff-raff; thieves, gamins — vagabonds of 
every description — flying before the gendarmes : now stopped 
by a cordon of soldiery drawn across a street, hustled into the 
presence of the commanding officer, interrogated, brow-beaten, 
and dismissed. When I state that the railway terminus is 
near Montmartre, and that I entered Paris by the Barriere 



58 LIBERTY, EQUALITY, ERATERXITY, AND MUSEETRY. 

de 1'Etoile, tlie courteous reader who knows Paris can form 
some idea of how very muddy, weary, and savage-tempered 
I was when I arrived at mine inn ; earnestly desiring to be 
able to take " mine ease " in it. 

Everybody knows the court-yard of a French hotel. How 
the host of waiters, chambermaids, porters, and general 
hangers-on, all appearing to have nothing to do, lounge 
about, doing it thoroughly, all day long. How the landlord 
sits placidly, in a species of alcove summer-house, smoking 
cigarettes, drinking sugar and water, and surveying each new 
comer with the satisfied look of a boa-constrictor just getting 
over the digestion of his last rabbit, and ready for a new one ; 
how the cook — "chef" we beg his pardon — flirts, white- 
capped, and white-jacketed, with the pretty daughter of the 
concierge. On the momentous morning of my arrival, all 
these things were changed. Waiters, chambermaids, boots, 
landlord, cook, commissionnaires, concierge, were huddled toge- 
ther in the hall. The cabmen attached to the hotel, slum- 
bered within their vehicles, reduced to a state of compulsory 
inactivity. The porter — a torpid Auvergnat — vaguely im- 
pressed with a conviction that there was danger somewhere, 
had let loose an enormous dog, with rather more of the wolf 
in his composition than was agreeable. The concierge's pretty 
daughter had disappeared from human ken altogether ; the 
concierge himself, deprived of his usual solace of the feuillelon 
of the " Constitutionnel," smoked morbidly, gazing with a 
fixed and stony rigidity of vision at one of the dreadful pro- 
clamations of the Government, which was pasted against his 
lodge, and which conveyed the ominous intimation that every 
one found with arms in his hands, on, behind, or about, a 
barricade, would be instantly shot — -fusille sur le champ. 

Everything, in fact, spoke of the state of siege. The news- 
papers were in a state of siege ; for the Government had 
suspended all but its own immediate organs. The offices of 
the sententious " Siecle," the mercurial " Presse," the satiric 
" Charivari," the jovial " Journal pour Eire," were occupied 
by the military ; and, to us English, they whispered even of a 
park of artillery in the Rue Vivienne, and of a Government 
proof-reader in the printing-office of "Galignani's Messenger," 
striking out obnoxious paragraphs by the dozen. The pro- 



LIBERTY, EQUALITY, FRATERNITY, AND MUSKETRY. 59 

visions were in a state of siege ; the milk was ont, and no one 
would volunteer to go to the cremiers for more ; the cabs, the 
commissionnaires with their trucks, were besieged ; the very gas 
was slow in coming from the main, as though the pipes were 
in a state of siege. Nobody could think or speak of anything 
but this confounded siege. Thought itself appeared to be 
beleaguered; for no one dared to give it anything but a 
cautious and qualified utterance. The hotel was full of English 
ladies and gentlemen, who would have been delighted to go 
away by the first train on any of the railways ; but there 
might just as well have been no railways, for all the good 
they were, seeing that it was impossible to get to or from the 
termini with safety. The gentlemen were valorous, certainly 
— there was a prevalence of " who's afraid?" sentiments; 
but they read the French Bradshaw earnestly, and gazed at 
the map of Paris with nervous interest — beating, meanwhile, 
the devil's tattoo. As for the ladies, dear creatures, they 
made no secret of their extreme terror and despair. The one 
old lady, who is frightened at everything, and who will not 
even travel in an omnibus, with a sword in a case, for fear it 
should go off, was paralysed with fear, and could only 
ejaculate, " Massacre ! " The strong-minded lady of a certain 
age, who had longed for the " pride, pomp, and circumstance 
of glorious war," had taken refuge in that excellent collection 
of tracts, of which " The Dairyman's Daughter " is one ; and 
gave short yelps of fear whenever the door opened. Fear, 
like every other emotion, is contagious. Remarking so many 
white faces, so much subdued utterance, so many cowed and 
terrified looks, I thought it very likely that I might get 
frightened, too. So, having been up all the previous night, 
I went to bed. 

I slept ; I dreamt of a locomotive engine blowing up, and 
turning into the last scene of a pantomime, with "state of 
siege " displayed in coloured fires. I dreamt I lived next door 
to an undertaker, or a trunk-maker, or a manufacturer of fire- 
works. I awoke to the rattle of musketry in the distance 
— soon, too soon, to be followed by the roar of the cannon. 

I am not a fighting man. " 'Tis not my vocation, Hal." 
I am not ashamed to say that I did not gird my sword 
on my thigh, and sally out to conquer or to die; that I 



60 LIBERTY, EQUALITY, FRATERNITY, AND MUSKETRY. 

did not ensconce myself at a second-floor window, and pick 
off, a la diaries IX., the leaders of the enemy below. Had 
I been " our own correspondent," I might have written, 
in the intervals of fighting, terrific accounts of the combat on 
cartridge paper, with a pen made from a bayonet, dipped in 
gunpowder and gore. Had I been " our own artist," I 
might have mounted a monster barricade — waving the flag 
of freedom with one hand, and taking sketches with the 
other. But being neither I did not do anything of the 
kind. I will tell you what I did : — I withdrew, with seven 
Englishmen as valorous as myself, to an apartment, which 1 
have reason to believe is below the basement floor ; and 
there, in company with sundry carafons of particular cognac, 
and a large box of cigars, passed the remainder of the day. 

I sincerely hope that I shall never pass such another. We 
rallied each other, talked, laughed, and essayed to sing ; but 
the awful consciousness of the horror of our situation hung 
over us all — the knowledge that within a few hundred yards 
of us God's image was being wantonly defaced ; that in the 
streets hard hj, in the heart of the most civilised city of 
the world, within a stone's throw of all that is gay, luxurious, 
splendid, in Paris, men — speaking the same language, worship- 
ing the same God — were shooting each other like wild beasts; 
that every time we heard the sharp crackling of the musketry, 
a message of death was gone forth to hundreds ; that every 
time the infernal artillery — " nearer, clearer, deadlier than 
before" — broke, roaring on the ear; the ground was cum- 
bered with corpses. Glorious war ! I should like the 
amateurs of sham fights, showy reviews, and scientific ball 
practice, to have sat with us in the cellar that same Thursday, 
and listened to the rattle and the roar. I should like them 
to have been present, when, venturing up during a lull, about 
half-past four, and glancing nervously from our porte-cochere, 
a regiment of dragoons came thundering past, pointing their 
pistols at the windows, and shouting at those within, with 
oaths, to retire from them. I should like the young ladies 
who waltz with the " dear Lancers," to have seen these 
Lancers, in stained white cloaks, with their murderous weapons 
couched. I should like those who admire the Horse Guards — 
the prancing steeds, the shining casques and cuirasses, the mas- 



LIBERTY, EQUALITY, FRATERNITY, AND MUSKETRY. 61 

sive epaulettes and dangling sabres, the trim moustache, irre- 
proachable buckskins, and dazzling jackboots — to have seen 
these cuirassiers gallop by : their sorry horses covered with 
mud and sweat ; their haggard faces blackened with gun- 
powder ; their shabby accoutrements and battered helmets. 
The bloody swords, the dirt, the hoarse voices, unkempt 
beards. Glorious war ! I think the sight of those horrible 
troopers would do more to cure its admirers than all the 
orators of the Peace Society coujd do in a twelvemonth ! 

We dined — without the ladies, of course — and sat up until 
very late ; the cannon and musketry roaring meanwhile, till 
nearly midnight. Then it stopped — 

To recommence again, however, on the next (Friday) morn- 
ing. Yesterday they had been fighting all day on the Boule- 
vards, from the Madeleine to the Temple. To-day, they were 
murdering each other at Belleville, at La Chapelle St. Denis, 
at Montmartre. Happily the filing ceased at about nine 
o'clock, and we heard no more. 

I do not, of course, pretend to give any account of what 
really took place in the streets on Thursday ; how many 
barricades were erected, and how they were defended or 
destroyed. I do not presume to treat of the details of the 
combat myself, confining what I have to say to a description 
of what I really saw of the social aspect of the city. The 
journals have given full accounts of what brigades executed 
what manoeuvres, of how many were shot to death here, and 
how many bayoneted there. 

On Friday at noon, the embargo on the cabs was removed 
— although that on the omnibuses continued ; and circulation 
for foot passengers became tolerably safe, in the Quartier St. 
Honore, and on the Boulevards. I went into an English 
chemist's shop in the Rue de la Paix, for a bottle of soda- 
water. The chemist was lying dead up-stairs, shot. He was 
going from his shop to another establishment he had in the 
Faubourg Poissoniere, to have the shutters shut, apprehending 
a disturbance. Entangled for a moment on the Boulevard, 
close to the Rue Lepelletier, among a crowd of well-dressed 
persons, principally English and Americans, an order was 
given to clear the Boulevard. A charge of Lancers was made, 
the men firing their pistols wantonly among the flying crowd ; 



62 LIBEETY, EQUALITY, FRATERNITY, AND MUSKETRY. 

and the chemist was shot dead. Scores of similar incidents 
took place on that dreadful Thursday afternoon. Friends, 
acquaintances, of my own, had friends, neighbours, rela- 
tions, servants, killed. Yet it was all accident, chance-medley 
— excusable, of course. How were the soldiers to distinguish 
between insurgents and sight-seers ? These murders were, 
after all, but a few of the thorns to be found in the rose- 
bush of glorious war ! 

From the street which in old Paris times used to go by 
the name of the Rue Royale, and which I know by the token 
that there is an English pastry-cook's on the right-hand side, 
coming down ; where in old days I used (a small lad then at 
the College Bourbon) to spend my half-holidays in consuming 
real English cheesecakes, and thinking of home : — in the 
Rue Royale, now called, I think, Rue de la Republique ; I 
walked on to the place, and by the Boulevard de la Made- 
leine, and that of des Italiens, and so by the long line 
of that magnificent thoroughfare, to within a few streets of the 
Porte St. Denis. Here I stopped, for the simple reason, that 
a hedge of soldiery bristled ominously across the road, 
close to the Rue du Faubourg Montmartre, and that the com- 
manding officer would let neither man, woman, nor child 
pass. The Boulevards were crowded, almost impassable in 
fact, with persons of every grade, from the " lion " of the 
Jockey Club, or the English nobleman, to the pretty 
grisette in her white cap, and the scowling, bearded citizen, 
clad in blouse and calotte, and looking very much as if he 
knew more of a barricade than he chose to aver. The 
houses on either side of the way bore frightful traces of the 
combat of the previous day. The Maison Dore, the Cafe 
Anglais, the Opera Comique, Tortoni's, the Jockey Club, the 
Belle Jardiniere, the Hotel des Affaires Etrangeres, and scores 
I might almost say hundreds, of the houses had their windows 
smashed, or the magnificent sheets of plate-glass starred with 
balls ; the walls pock-marked with bullets : seamed and 
scarred and blackened with gunpowder. A grocer, close to 
the Rue de Marivaux, told me that he had not been able 
to open his door that morning for the dead bodies piled on 
the step before it. Round all the young trees (the old 
trees were cut down for former barricades in February 



:e 

e 

i 



LIBERTY, EQUALITY, FRATERNITY, AND MUSKETRY. 63 

and June 1848), the ground shelves a little in a circle; 
in these circles there were pools of blood. The people — . 
the extraordinary, inimitable, consistently inconsistent French 
people — were unconcernedly lounging about, looking at these 
things with pleased yet languid curiosity. They paddled in 
the pools of blood ; they traced curiously the struggles of some 
wounded wretch, who, shot or sabred on the kerbstone, had 
painfully, deviously, dragged himself (so the gouts of blood 
showed) to a door-step — to die. They felt the walls, pitted 
by musket bullets; they poked their walking-sticks into 
the holes made by the cannon balls. It was as good as a 
play to them. 

The road on either side was lined with dragoons armed 
cap-a-pie. The poor tired horses were munching the forage 
with which the muddy ground was strewn ; and the troopers 
sprawled listlessly about, smoking their short pipes, and 
mending their torn costume or shattered accoutrements. 
Indulging, however, in the dolce far niente, as they seemed 
to be, they were ready for action at a moment's notice. 
There was, about two o'clock, an alerte — a rumour of some 
tumult towards the Rue St. Denis. One solitary trumpet 
sounded "boot and saddle;" and, with almost magical 
celerity, each dragoon twisted a quantity of forage into a 
species of rope, which he hung over his saddle-bow, crammed 
his half-demolished loaf into his holsters, buckled on his 
cuirass ; then, springing himself on his horse, sat motion- 
less : each cavalier with his pistol cocked, and his finger on 
the trigger. The crowd thickened ; and in the road itself 
there was a single file of cabs, carts, and even private 
carriages. Almost every moment detachments of prisoners, 
mostly blouses, passed along escorted by cavalry ; then a 
yellow flag was seen, announcing the approach of an am- 
bulance, or long covered vehicle filled with wounded soldiers ; 
then hearses; more prisoners, more ambulances, orderly 
dragoons at full gallop, orderlies, military surgeons in their 
cocked hats and long frock-coats, broughams with smart general 
officers inside, all smoking. 

As to the soldiers, they appear never to leave off smoking. 
They smoke in the guard-room, off duty, and even when 
on guard. An eye-witness of the combat told me that 



64 LIBERTY, EQUALITY, FRATERNITY, AND MUSKETRY. 

many of the soldiers had, when charging, short pipes in 
their mouths, and the officers, almost invariably, smoked 
cigars. 

In reference to the discipline of the French soldiery, 
and their extreme trustworthiness against their own coun- 
trymen, I have heard some wise men, much astonished 
by, and virtuously indignant at, the testimony of certain 
witnesses, published in the " Times " newspaper. They 
have their confirmation though (new and strange as they 
are to such authorities) in the evidence of an officer of 
some merit, called The Duke of Wellington, before a Select 
Committee on Punishments in the Army. The following 
passage occurs : 

"Upon service, do you conceive that the discipline of the Army, which you 
had under your command in the Peninsula, was superior to the discipline of the 
French troops opposed to you ? — I have not the most distant doubt of it ; 
infinitely superior. 

" Superior in respect to the treatment of the country in which they were 
serving ? — Not to be compared with it, even in their own country, an enemy's 
country to us ; and to them, their own country. 

' ' In what respect was the French Army so inferior to ours ?— A general 
system of plunder ; great laxity in the performance of their duty ; great 
irregularity; in short, irregularity, which we could not venture to risk 
existence on. 

" Was it not the fact, that the people came home to their houses when the 
English were to occupy them ; having left them when the French were to 
occupy them ? — Yes, that was the case." 

At three, there was more trumpeting, more drumming, a 
general backing of horses on the foot-passengers, announcing 
the approach of some important event. A cloud of cavalry 
came galloping by ; then, a numerous and brilliant group of 
staff-officers. In the midst of these, attired in the uniform of 
a general of the National Guard, rode Louis Napoleon Bona- 
parte. 

I saw him again the following day, in the Champs Elysees, 
riding with a single English groom behind him ; and again 
in a chariot escorted by cuirassiers. 

When he had passed, I essayed a further progress towards 
the Rue St. Denis ; but the hedge of bayonets still bristled as 
ominously as ever. I went into a little tobacconist's shop ; 
and the pretty marchande showed me a frightful trace of the 
passage of a cannon ball, which had gone right through the 



LIBERTY, EQUALITY, FRATERNITY, AND MUSKETRY. 65 

shutter and glass, smashed cases on eases of cigars, and half 
demolished the little tobacconist's parlour. 

My countrymen were in great force on the Boulevards, 
walking arm and arm, four abreast, as it is the proud custom 
of Britons to do. From them I heard how Major Pongo, of 
the Company's service, would certainly have placed his sword 
at the disposal of the Government in support of law and order, 
had he not been confined to his bed with a severe attack of 
rheumatism ; how Mr. Bellows, Parisian correspondent to the 
''Evening Grumbler," had been actually led out to be shot, 
and was only saved by the interposition of his tailor, who was 
a Serjeant in the National Guard, and who, passing by, 
though not on duty, exerted his influence with the military 
authorities, to save the life of Mr. Bellows ; how the reverend 
Mr. Faldstool, ministre Anglican, was discovered in a corn-bin, 
moaning piteously ; how Bluckey, the man who talked so much 
about the Pytchley hounds, and of the astonishing leaps he 
had taken when riding after them, concealed himself in a 
coal-cellar, and, lying down on his face, never stirred from 
that position from noon till midnight on Thursday (although I, 
to be sure, have no right to taunt him with his prudence); 
how, finally, M'Gropus, the Scotch surgeon, bolted incon- 
tinently in a cab, with an immense quantity of luggage, 
towards the Chemin-de-fer du Nord ; and, being stopped in 
the Rue St. Denis, was ignominiously turned out of his 
vehicle by the mob ; the cab, together with M'Gropus's 
trunks, being immediately converted into the nucleus of a 
barricade : — how, returning the following morning to see 
whether he could recover any portion of his effects, he found 
the barricades in the possession of the military, who were 
quietly cooking their soup over a fire principally fed by the 
remnants of his trunks and portmanteaus ; whereupon, fran- 
tically endeavouring to rescue some disjecta membra of his 
property from the wreck, he was hustled and bonneted by the 
soldiery, threatened with arrest, and summary military ven- 
geance, and ultimately paraded from the vicinity of the 
bivouac, by bayonets with sharp points. 

With the merits or demerits of the struggle, I have nothing 
to do. But I saw the horrible ferocity and brutality of this 
ruthless soldiery. I saw them bursting into shops, to search 



86 LIBERTY, EQUALITY, FRATERNITY, AND MUSKETRY. 

for arms or fugitives ; dragging the inmates forth, like sheep 
from a slaughter-house, smashing the furniture and windows. 
I saw them, when making a passage for a convoy of prisoners, 
or a wagon full of wounded, strike wantonly at the bystanders, 
with the butt- ends of their muskets, and thrust at them with 
their bayonets. I might have seen more ; but my exploring 
inclination was rapidly subdued by a gigantic Lancer at the 
corner of the Rue Richelieu ; who seeing me stand still for a 
moment, stooped from his horse, and putting his pistol to my 
head (right between the eyes) told me to " traverser !" As I 
believed he would infallibly have blown my brains out in 
another minute, I turned and fled. So much for what I saw. 
I know, as far as a man can know, from trustworthy persons, 
from eye-witnesses, from patent and notorious report, that the 
military — the sole and supreme masters of that unhappy city 
and country — perpetrated most frightful barbarities after the 
riots were over. I know that, from the Thursday I arrived, 
to the Thursday I left Paris, they were daily shooting their 
prisoners in cold blood ; that a man, caught on the Pont 
Neuf, drunk with the gunpowder-brandy of the cabarets, and 
shouting some balderdash about the Republique democratique et 
sociale, was dragged into the Prefecture of Police, and, some 
soldiers' cartridges having been found in his pocket, was led 
into the court-yard, and, there and then, untried, unshriven, 
unaneled, — shot ! I know that in the Champ de Mars one 
hundred and fifty-six men were executed ; and I heard one 
horrible story (so horrible that I can scarcely credit it) that a 
batch of prisoners were tied together with ropes, like a fagot 
of wood ; and that the struggling mass was fired into, until 
not a limb moved, nor a groan was uttered. I know — and 
my informant was a clerk in the office of the Ministry of War 
— that the official return of insurgents killed, was two thousand 
and seven, and of soldiers fifteen. Rather long odds ! 

We were in-doors betimes on Friday evening, comparing 
notes busily, as to what we had seen during the day. We 
momentarily expected to hear the artillery again, but, thank 
Heaven, the bloodshed in the streets at least was over ; and 
though Paris was still a city in a siege, the barricades were 
all demolished ; and another struggle was for the moment 
crushed. 



LIBERTY, EQUALITY, FRATERNITY, AND MUSKETRY. 67 

The streets next day were full of hearses; but even the 
number of funerals that took place were insignificant, in com- 
parison to the stacks of corpses which were cast into deep 
trenches without shroud or coffin, and covered with quick- 
lime. I went to the Morgue in the afternoon, and found that 
dismal charnel-house fully tenanted. Every one of the four- 
teen beds had a corpse ; some, dead with gunshot wounds ; 
some, sabred; some, horribly mutilated by cannon balls. 
There was a queue outside of at least two thousand people, 
laughing, talking, smoking, eating apples, as though it was 
some pleasant spectacle they were going to, instead of that 
frightful exhibition. Yet, in this laughing, talking, smoking 
crowd, there were fathers who had missed their sons ; sons who 
came there dreading to see the corpses of their fathers ; wives 
of Socialist workmen, sick with the almost certainty of finding 
the bodies of their husbands. The bodies were only exposed 
six hours ; but the clothes remained — a very grove of blouses. 
The neighbouring churches were hung with black, and there 
were funeral services at St. Roch and at the Madeleine. 

And yet — with this Golgotha so close ; with the blood not 
yet dry on the Boulevards; with corpses yet lying about 
the streets ; with five thousand soldiers bivouacking in the 
Champs Elysees ; with mourning and lamentation in almost 
every street ; with a brutal military in almost every printing- 
office, tavern, cafe ; with proclamations threatening death and 
confiscation covering the walls ; with the city in a siege, 
without a legislature, without laws, without a government- — 
this extraordinary people was, the next night, dancing and 
flirting at the Salle Valentino, or the Prado, lounging in the 
foyers of the Italian Opera, gossiping over their eau-sucree, 
or squabbling over their dominoes outside and inside the 
cafes. I saw Rachel in " Les Horaces" ; I went to the 
Varietes, the Opera Comique, and many other theatres ; and as 
we walked home at night through lines of soldiers, brooding 
over their bivouacs, I went into a restaurant ; and, asking 
whether it had been a ball which had starred the magnificent 
pier-glass before me, got for answer, " Ball, sir I — cannon- 
ball, sir! — yes, sir!" for all the world as though I had 
inquired about the mutton being in good cut, or asparagus in 
season ! 

f 2 



68 LIBERTY, EQUALITY, FRATERNITY, AND MUSKETRY. 

So, while they were shooting prisoners and dancing the 
Schottische at the Casino ; burying their dead ; selling 
breloques for watch-chains in the Palais Royal ; demolishing 
barricades, and staring at the caricatures in M. Aubert's 
windows ; taking the wounded to the hospitals, and stock- 
jobbing on the Bourse ; I went about my business, as well as 
the state of siege would let me. Turning my face homeward, 
I took the Rouen and Havre Railway, and so, via Southampton, 
to London. As I saw the last cocked hat of the last gendarme 
disappear with the receding pier at Havre, a pleasant vision 
of the blue-coats, oil-skin hats, and lettered collars of the 
land I was going to, swam before my eyes ; and, I must say 
that, descending the companion-ladder, I thanked Heaven I 
was an Englishman. I was excessively sea-sick, but not the 
less thankful ; and getting at last to sleep, dreamed of the 
Bill of Rights and Habeas Corpus. I wonder how they would 
flourish amidst Liberty, Equality, Fraternity, and Musketry ! 



DOORS. 



An ingenious writer or talker, I am not certain which, once 
proposed to trace the progress of human civilisation by the 
number of prongs in the fork with which we eat our food. 
The imperfectly civilised man, he showed, ate with a skewer 
or a fish-bone ; our middle-age ancestors were content with a 
dagger or a hunting-knife to sever their victual and convey it 
to their mouths ; then came the fork with two prongs, which 
is yet used by the peasant in some remote parts of England. 
Advancing civilisation brought with it the three-pronged fork 
— of fiddle, king, or prince's pattern ; and now that we are in 
the apogee of our refinement, the gourmand demands, obtains, 
and uses the fork of four prongs. Each succeeding age may 
add another prong to the fork, until the number amount to 
ten ; then perhaps extremes will meet, and we shall revert to 
the simple austerity of savages, and eat with our ten fingers. 

I scarcely know why I should have noticed this ingenious 
theory, for I am not at all inclined to agree with it, and do 
not, myself, see any special analogy between civilisation and 
forks. For the most civilised nations and renowned epicures 
of antiquity used not any forks — save to make furcifers, as a 
mark of ignominy for criminals ; and the most ancient people 
and most elaborate professors cf social etiquette in the world 
— the Chinese — have no forks to this day, and have no better 
conductors to their mouths for their stewed dog and edible 
bird's-nests than chop -sticks. I take Sir John Bowring to 
witness. However, just as that valiant Field Marshal Thomas, 
alias Thumb, was accused of making his giants before he 
slew them, and as an advertising tradesman mentions his 
rival's wares in order to decry them and puff his own, it may 
be that I have touched upon the theory of civilisation and 
forks to enable me with a better grace to introduce my own 
theory of civilisation and doors. 



70 DOORS. 

The savage has no door to his dwelling. Even when he 
has ceased burrowing in the ground like a rabbit or a wild 
dog, and has advanced to the dignity of a hut, or kraal, a 
hunting-lodge, a canoe turned keel upwards, or any one of 
those edifices in resemblance between a wasps' -nest and a dirt- 
pie, in which it is the delight of the chief and warrior to 
dwell, to dance, to howl, to paint himself and to eat his foes, 
he never rises to the possession of a door. The early Greeks 
and Romans had doorways, but no doors. Noah's ark — the 
ridiculous toy- shop figment notwithstanding, could not have 
had a door. Mordecai sat in the gate, but Hainan's door is 
nowhere mentioned. The old painters who represent Dives 
take care to show you an opening into the street, but no door ; 
and through the entrance you see Lazarus lying, and the dogs 
licking his sores. The mouths of caves and sepulchres in 
oriental countries where the dead were buried were closed 
with huge stones ; it was reserved for our age of funeral 
furnishers and cemetery companies to build a mausoleum over 
our dear brother departed with a door with panels, and knobs, 
and nails, and carvings, wanting only a brass knocker to have 
everything in common with the door of a desirable family 
mansion. The Parthenon had no door : go and look at its 
modelled counterfeit in the British Museum ; through the 
lofty portal you see the wilderness of columns and the gigantic 
statue of the goddess. The great temples of Nineveh and 
Babylon, of Ephesus and Egypt, had no doors. Skins and 
linen veils, tapestries and curtains of silk, were hung across 
doorways then — as, in the East, they are now — to ensure 
privacy to those within ; Gaza had gates, and so had Som- 
nauth ; but the door, the door-knocker, the brass-plate, the 
bells that flank it, for visitors and servants, the iron chain, 
the latch-key, the top and bottom bolts — these are all the 
inventions of modern times, and the offshoots of modern 
civilisation. Wherever there is most luxury, you will find 
most doors. Poverty, dirt, barbarism, have little or no doors 
yet. Again, where manners are rude and unpolished, a post, 
a pit, a cellar, a cage, suffice for the confinement of a criminal ; 
but where men congregate thickly — where art, learning, and 
commerce flourish, where riches multiply, and splendour pre- 
vails — men must have prisons with many doors : ten, twenty, 









DOORS. 71 

thirty, one inside the other, like carvings in a Chinese 
concentric ball. 

Doors have as many aspects as men. Every trade and 
calling, every sect and creed, every division and subdivision 
of the bod}' - social, have their several characteristic doors. As 
in the curious old toy-clocks made at Nuremburg, the apostles 
came out at one door ; an angel at another ; the cock that, 
crowing, confounded Peter, at another ; while Judas Iscariot 
had a peculiar low-browed door to himself, from which he 
popped when the hour struck ; so now-a-days, in our clock of 
life, every grade has its special doors of ingress and egress. 
Royalty rattles through the big door of Buckingham Palace ; 
while Lieut. -Colonel Phipps modestly slips in by the side- 
postern, hard by the guard-house, and the grooms and 
scullions, the footmen and turnspits, the cooks and bottle- 
washers, modester still, steal round the corner into Pimlico, 
and are admitted by a back door opposite the Gun tavern. 
So the Duke of Mesopotamia's guests to ball or supper are 
ushered up the lofty flight of steps, and in at the great hall- 
door ; while Molly the housemaid's friend creeps down the 
area steps, and taps at the door opposite the coal-cellar. So 
the theatre has its doors — box, pit, and gallery — with one 
private, sacred portal for the Queen Bee when she condescends 
to patronise the drama ; a door leading into a narrow, incon- 
venient, little passage generally, with a flight of stairs seem- 
ingly designed for the express purpose of breaking the neck 
of the stage-manager, who walks in crab-like fashion, before 
Majesty, backwards, in an absurd court-suit, and holding two 
lighted tapers in battered old stage candlesticks, hot drops oi 
wax from which fall in a bounteous shower upon his black 
silk smalls. Just contrast this multitude of doors with the 
simple arrangements of the Roman amphitheatres. Apertures 
there were in plenty to allow the audience departure, but they 
were common to all ; and the patrician and his client, the 
plebeian and the freedman, struggled out of the Coliseum by 
the same vomitories. There was but one special door in the 
whole circus ; and that was one, entrance through which was 
envied by nobody, for it was of iron, and barred, and on the 
inside thereof was a den where the lions that ate the 
gladiators lay. 



72 DOORS. 

The church has many doors. One for the worshippers 
who are lessees of pews, or are willing to pay one shilling 
a-head for doctrine ; one leading to the ricketty gallery where 
the charity children sit ; one which the parson and clerk more 
especially affect, for it leads to the vestry ; and one — a dark, 
dank, frowning door — in a sort of shed in the churchyard ; 
this last is the door of which the sexton has the key — the 
door of the bare room with the whitewashed walls, the brick 
floor, and the tressels standing in the midst — the door of the 
house of death. 

Then there is the great door of justice in the hall where 
that glorious commodity is so liberally dispensed to all who 
seek it ; though, to be sure, the dispensation is not in bright, 
sterling, current coin, but is ordinarily given in kind : horse- 
hair, sheepskin, pounce (some while called devil's dust), words, 
stale jokes, wigs, and lies being (per force) taken in lieu of 
cash — as poisonous, sloe-juice port wine and worthless pictures 
are from a Jew bill-discounter. This is the great door that 
must never be closed against suitors ; and never is closed — 
oh, dear no ! — any more than the front door of the mansion 
inhabited by my friend Mr. "Webspinner the Spider, who 
keeps open house continually, and — hospitable creature ! — 
defies malevolence to prove that he ever closed his door against 
a fly. Justice has more doors. There is the private door 
leading to the judges' robing-room ; the door for the criminals, 
and the door for the magistrate in the police-court. There is 
the great spiked door through which the committed for trial 
enter into Newgate ; and there is the small, black, iron- 
gnarled door above the level of the street — the debtors' door, 
where the last debt is to be paid, and whence come in the 
raw morning the clergyman reading of the resurrection and 
the life, and after him the pallid man with his arms tied with 
ropes, who is to be hanged by the neck until he be dead. 
After this, there is but one more door that will concern him 
— the door that must concern us all some day — the door 
covered with cloth, neatly panelled with tin-tacks or gilt nails, 
according to our condition ; with an engraved plate, moreover, 
bearing our name and age : the door that opens not with a 
handle, or closes with a lock, or has hinges, but is unpre- 
tendingly fastened to its house by screws — the door that has 



DOOHS. 7o 

no knocker, for the sleeper behind it must be wakened with a 
trumpet, and not a rat-tat. 

Bid me discourse (but you won't, I am afraid), and I could 
be eloquent upon the doors of prisons. How many times 
have I stopped in the thronged, muddy Old Bailey (it is 
muddy even on the sunniest, dustiest of August days) and 
gazed long and wistfully, albeit the quarter chimes of St. 
Sepulchre (they seem to succeed each other more rapidly than 
any other chimes) bade me move on, at the dreadful doors of 
Newgate. Ugh ! the great door. I remember as a boy 
wondering if any famous criminal — Turpin, Duval, or Shep- 
pard — had ever worn the ponderous irons suspended in grisly 
festoons over the gateway : likewise, if the statues in the 
niches flanking it were effigies of men and women that had 
been hanged. To this day, I cannot make up my mind as to 
whether those festooned fetters are real or sham — whether 
they ever encircled human ankles or not. I am afraid, in any 
case, that they have more of reality in them than the famous 
highwaymen whom I once supposed them to have held in 
durance. The laced coats, the plumed hats, silver-hilted 
swords, blood-horses, under-ground stables, Pollys and Lucys, 
titles of captain, and connections among the aristocracy of 
those worthies, have long since turned out notable shams. 
There is no reality to me now in the gallant highwayman in 
woodcuts and penny numbers (with number one of which was 
given away part the first of " Ralph R,ulloeks the Reckless, 
or the Poetical Pirate") careering about Hounslow Heath, 
with a chivalrous, mad-cap whim of robbing their uncle the 
earl in his travelling carriage. I have found out the high- 
wayman by this time as a coarse, depraved, strong- water- 
drinking ruffian, who had merely the advantage over the 
ordinary larcener in being a horsepad in lieu of a footpad. 

The subject of fetters (this is but a random gossip on a 
doorstep after all, or I would not digress), brings to my mind 
an appalling day-vision I once had of a man in fetters — a 
vision slight, every day, common-place it may be, but one 
which I shall never forget, living. I lived, when I saw the 
thing, in one of the crowded streets of London — a main 
thoroughfare to everything metropolitan — and in a front 
room. Moreover, next door there was a large public-house, 



74 DOORS. 

with a huge gas-lamp in front that glared into my room at 
night like a fiery dragon. The situation was rather noisy at 
first, the stream of vehicles being interminable, and the 
neighbourhood given to drink ; but I soon grew accustomed 
to the rattle of the carts, omnibuses, and cabs, and the shrieks 
of the revellers given to drink as they rushed into the Coach 
and Horses ; or when the drink being in them they were 
violently ejected therefrom. I was supposed to be at work 
close to the window ; and while the supposition was in force 
was in the habit of taking a snatch of street life, just as a 
man might gulp a mouthful of fresh air, raising my eyes to 
the mad panorama of carriages and people in the street 
beneath — the panting multitude always running after some- 
thing, or away from somebody, but none of them able to run 
as fast as the lean old man with the scythe and the hour-glass, 
who outstripped them all, and hit them when they were down. 
One day — the turmoil was at its height — a hack cab cut 
cleverly from the opposite side of the way, through the line 
of vehicles, neatly shaving a hearse and a bishop's carriage 
(at least it had a mitre on the panels, footmen in purple 
liveries, and a rosy man in an apron inside), and drew up at 
the door of the Coach and Horses. What was there extra- 
ordinary in this, you will ask. There were two men inside 
the cab, and one got out. Nothing extraordinary yet. But 
the man who was left inside the cab was tall in stature and 
stalwart in build. He had a brown handsome face, and dark 
curling hair and beard. He had a fur cap on and a loose 
sort of pelisse great coat covered with frogs and embroidery. 
He might have had all these, and the sea-bronze (as if he had 
come from afar) on his face, and the travel-stains on his 
dress ; have been a Polish Count, a Hungarian General, or a 
Spanish Legionary, and have driven away again as fast as he 
liked without my special notice, but for his fetters. He was 
literally covered with manacles. On legs and arms, wrists 
and ankles, bright, shining, new-looking, dreadfully heavy- 
looking chains. If he had been the man with the Iron Mask 
come to life again and from the citadel of Pignerolles, he 
could not have interested me as much as he did in these 
bonds. He who had got out, and who had entered the Coach 
and Horses, came out again almost immediately, bearing a 



DOORS. 75 

pot of beer, of which he gave the fettered man to drink. He 
lifted the vessel to his lips with his gyved hands so painfully, 
so slowly, and yet, Heavens ! with such longing eagerness in 
his black eyes, and drank until, to use an excessively familiar, 
but popular expression, he must have seen " Guinness' s 
Card " quite distinctly. Then his companion, keeper, gaoler, 
kidnapper, abductor — whatever he may have been besides — 
stout, florid, common looking, with a flufFy hat, thick boots, 
and a red woollen comforter tied round his neck, took the 
empty measure back (he had had something short and com- 
fortable himself at the bar, evidently), returned to the cab, 
entered it, gave the driver a direction, and drove off with the 
brown-faced man in chains. And this was all. What more 
should there be ? Anything or nothing : but my'work became 
even less than a supposition for the rest of that day. It faded 
into a pure nonentity. I began to wonder, and have been 
wondering ever since about the man in chains. Who, what 
was he ? Where did he come from, where was he going ? 
Like the grim piratical mariner in Washington Irving' s story 
of Wolfert Webber — the mysterious man with the sea chest, 
who came in a storm and went away in a storm, all that I 
was ever able to ascertain about the man in manacles was, 
that he came in a cab, and that he went away in a cab. 
What was his crime ? Murder, felony, high treason, return 
from transportation without leave ! Had he come from beyond 
sea, from the hulks — was he going to the Tower, Newgate, 
Milbank, Horsemonger Lane? Where did they put the 
irons upon him, and why, and how ? A fur cap and fetters ; 
a frogged coat and fetters — mystery ! Who was the man 
with him ? A detective policeman, the governor of a county 
gaol, a dockyard warder, a beefeater disguised in a fluffy hat 
and a comforter, with red legs and slashed shoes, with roses 
perhaps concealed beneath his pepper and salt trousers and 
thick shoes ? Who is to tell ? The man is hanged, perhaps, 
by this time. Very probably he was but a vulgar house- 
breaker, or an escaped convict ; but he will be a mystery to 
me, and I shall think of him whenever I see the fetters hang- 
ing over the grimy door of Newgate, as long as there are any 
miserable little mysteries in this lower life to interest, or 
perplex. 



76 DOORS. 

I must still linger a moment by the door in the Old Bailey; 
for underneath the fetters there are many other suggestive 
things. That half door — the barrier between liberty and 
freedom, surmounted by spikes, curled corkscrew- wise, like 
the snakes in the furies' love-locks. The gloomy, roomy, 
dusky lodge, where there are more fetters I know, and bluff 
turnkeys with huge bunches of keys, and many many more 
doors leading into stone corridors and grim paved yards, at 
the end of which are other doors. That tremendous black 
board in the lodge covered with the tedious inscription in 
white paint. Do the turnkeys ever read it, I wonder ? Do 
the Lord Mayor and Sheriffs ? Does the Ordinary ? Did 
ever a criminal brought from the dark van into the darker 
prison read that inscription through, I should like to know ? 
I opine that what is written upon it must be something about 
prison rules, Acts of Parliament, the Lord Mayor and Sheriffs, 
with a possible allusion to the Common Council and the Court 
of" Lieutenancy ; but I can fancy, with a shudder, how it must 
read, if read at all, to the handcuffed man who stands in the 
entrance lodge of Newgate, fully committed. Did you ever 
read a writ, and see Victoria by the Grace of God figuring up 
and down on the paper with Lord John Campbell at West- 
minster, until there seemed to be fifty sovereign ladies and 
fifty chief justices conglomerated into the narrow strip ? Did 
you ever read a letter in which it was told you that a dear 
friend was dead ; and though the manner of his death was 
therein set down at length, see nothing but dead ! forty times 
in every line of forty ? Did you ever receive a ten-pound 
note when you were desperately poor, and at bay with hunger, 
and find nothing but tens all over the note — ten Mr. Mathew 
Marshalls, ten Britannias, ten times ten promises to pay ten 
pounds ? Some such optical reiteration must there appear to 
the prisoner who gazes on the sad black board, I should think. 
Or, his thoughts full of fear and horror, must fly to the board, 
and fixing themselves there, multiply themselves horribly in a 
medley of despair. Fully committed, fully committed. To 
the place from whence you came. From whence you came. 
For the term of your natural life. Your natural life. Your 
life. By the neck until you be dead. Be dead. And the 
Lord have mercy on your soul. Your soul. 



DOORS. 77 

The pot-boy who carries beer into the lodge of Newgate ; 
the unshaven man from the coffee-shop opposite, who brings 
hot coffee and thick wedges of bread and butter ; the waiters 
from the eating-house do not trouble themselves much about 
the philosophy of prison-doors, I dare say. Nor does the 
Lord Mayor himself condescend, I should think, to hang about 
the door of Newgate, and descant in a rambling, vagabond 
fashion on it. By the way, I could pass a pleasantly profitable 
hour by his lordship's own door in Charlotte Row, Mansion 
House. I could say something neat, had I time, about the 
tremendous flunkies — the absurd people with bald heads and 
wig-bags (what on earth can a bald wigless man want with a 
wig-bag sewn on to the collar of his coat ?) and court dresses, 
who drive up in tinsel chariots to the door of the civic king. 
Also about the smell of hot meats that comes gushing from 
the door from above and below it on the night that the Lord 
Mayor, has ''spreads." The Lord Mayor's door would fill 
some pages of instructive reading, and I will book it. But 
what should " Moon — Mayor " care about the door of New- 
gate ? What should the turnkeys care about it, save to see 
that it is properly bolted and barred every night? What 
should the policemen, those unconcerned stoics, to whom all 
the world are but so many million men, women, and children 
— so many of whom have been or have not been in custody — 
but probably will be, some day. But to the prisoner the 
gaol-door must be awfully suggestive — full of dreadful memo- 
ries — for ever and ever. 

The prison-door is the gate of horn that will substitute 
itself for the gate of ivory, in his dreams of pleasant crime. 
At the door he leaves the world — wife, children, friends — 
exchanges the apparel of his station, be it satin or serge, for 
one uniform livery of degradation — leaves behind his very 
name, and becomes No. 96. On one side of the door — love, 
friendship, wealth, wine, tobacco, music — all : on the other 
side a cell, gruel, spiked- walls, silence, solitude, coarse rugs, 
keys, a man in a gray jacket and trousers marked with a 
number, and doors. Doors open and shut to let him pass to 
chapel, exercise, dinner, punishment, execution. The last 
thing he hears at night is the echoing clang of the door as 
the turnkey shuts him in his lonely cell. The first thing he 



78 DOORS. 

watch.es for in the morning is the noise of the key turning in 
the lock of the door. That door may creakingly turn upon 
its hinges soon, and bring the governor with a discharge. It 
may bring the chaplain with the last fatal tidings. At the 
gaol-door money, and victuals, and letters, when the prisoner 
is allowed to receive them, are left. Nor farther than the 
door can the wife and children — who love him in spite of all 
his crimes, all his brutality, all his madness — come ; save at 
rare intervals ; when they can see and speak to him through 
more doors — double doors of iron bars — with a turnkey 
sitting in the space between. At the door waits for him, 
when the term of his imprisonment has expired, the haggard 
woman with bruises scarcely yet healed, for outraging whom 
the prison door was closed on him six months since. She 
waits for him in love, and patience, and long-suffering ; or now 
it is the mother, whose heart he has broken, and whose gray 
hairs he is bringing with sorrow to the grave, who, forlorn, 
trusting old woman, waits to give him money and clothes, 
and hails him into a cook-shop, that he may eat a hearty 
meal of victuals, which he must want, she thinks, after all 
these months; and, while he eats and drinks, sobs on his 
shoulder and cries over his potatoes, praying God to bless 
and mend him, and crying that she will do anything — any- 
thing for him, if he will only be good. And, at the prison- 
door, alas ! wait often the companions of the cursed old days. 
Tom, with the red neckhandkerchief ; Ned, with the curl on 
his cheek and the coat with pearl buttons ; old Verdy greens, 
the white-headed dwarf, who buys old iron and lead piping ; 
bouncing Sal, that Amazon of Westminster Broadway, who 
muzzled the bull-necked Bobby, single-handed. They all 
throng round him at the door and clap him on the back, and 
cry shame on the authorities for his loss of weight in flesh. 
Then off they go to the other well-known door — that of the 
public-house, to drink — cards, dominoes, raffles, robbery, 
plots, and, in due course of time, to the old door again of 
Newgate, Milbank, To thill or Cold Bath Fields. Inveni 
Portam ! 

In the vast freestone desert of Newgate there is one bright 
little oasis of a door that I cannot forbear mentioning. It is 
reached by a flight of trim, neatly hearthstoned steps. It is 



DOORS. 79 

a pleasant, cheerful, bright-coloured coquettish-looking door, 
i with a brass knocker, and on its resplendent doorplate are 
engraven, in the handsomest Roman capitals you would desire 
to see, the words, W. W. Cope. It does me good to see this 
door ; for, on each side of it are windows with cheerful 
coloured curtains, and in one window there is a birdcage, and 
through the little polished panes I did, one day, descry the 
features of a pretty housemaid. This door is the jewel in 
the head of the Great Toad-like prison. Yet, I grow nervous 
about it occasionally, thinking what an awkward thing it 
would be if some Jack Sheppard of modern times, who had 
forced through the inner windows of the gaol, were to pop out 
of W. W. Cope's dandified door some day, and dance a horn- 
pipe, in fetters, upon the snowy doorstep. 

But I must close the Door, for this time, at least. I cast 
one hasty glance at the mysterious door in the shed in the 
Sessions House yard, in which — as legends of my youth used 
to run — the gallows and the posts of scaffolds were kept. It 
is a door I would not see opened, willingly ; so I leave New- 
gate, that vast congeries of doors, and which, in good sooth, 
was one Great Door itself before it was a prison. 



FOUK STOEIES. 



I must express my belief that a Frenchman's rooms have 
far greater claim to be considered his castle than an English- 
man's honse has. There are no landladies, there are no 
maids-of- all- work, there are no door knockers (none are used 
at least), and no parish fire engines. The law, as represented 
by the Commissary of Police, is the only visitor you, as an 
occupant of a French house, are compelled to admit ; and, 
though in times of commotion you are certainly subject to an 
irruption of cocked hats, jack boots, and clinking sabres into 
your domicile, a general turning over of your papers, and 
ripping up of your feather beds, to facilitate the discovery of 
treasonable documents, you may at all other seasons proudly 
call your house (whether it consists of saloon, bedroom, ante- 
chamber, and boudoir, or simply of a mansarde au sixieme, or 
garret on the sixth floor) your castle. You have the key of 
it, and as long as you pay your rent you are absolutely master 
therein. If you choose to have your bed made, the lodge 
keeper will make it for the consideration of twentypence paid 
monthly ; if you choose to make it yourself you can do so ; 
if you prefer it not made at all, and choose to keep pigs and 
a few live rabbits under the pillow, you may. Only, if your 
concierge, or porter, doesn't see you pass the lodge once in a 
week or so, he smells a rat, and fetches a Commissary of 
Police. The Commissary arrives ; makes the customary sum- 
mons in the name of the law, and breaks the door open, 
legally. Suppose you have died of starvation : suppose you 
have suffocated yourself with the fumes of charcoal : justice 
informs itself; aproces verbal is drawn up, and if you have no 
relations and no Mends, you are put into a wooden box and 
driven off in a something like an omnibus with the sides 
knocked out, by a driver in a cocked hat, and put into a grave 
in the cemetery of Montmartre. 



FOUK STORIES. 81 

The house I live in is four stories high and a perfect 
citadel of separate little fortalices. The inhabitants are sub- 
jected, it is true, to domiciliary visits, and to the complaints of 
their neighbours should they practise the big drum, or the 
Sax-horn, rather too loudly or too often; but setting these 
little matters aside, they are as completely masters at home as 
ever baron of old was in his battlemented barbican. There is 
a staircase common to the whole house (and not very clean) 
which is neutral ground ; a very place of reunion for the cats 
of the different stories, and for quiet afternoon gossips, should 
number twelve feel conversationally inclined towards number 
five. But the castles themselves are inviolable. 

There is a great deal of social kindliness, and cheerful 
neighbourship in our four stories ; but our castles are our 
castles irrevocably and intact, and we have our more than 
Eleusinian mysteries. In an English lodging-house a tenant 
could not reside three weeks without his avocations, his 
Mends, and general social position being more or less known, 
or certainly assumed. But in our four-storied house, the 
first-floor might be occupied by a wild beast tamer (with his 
menagerie occupying the boudoir), the second by a secret 
society of Illuminati, and the third by a private lunatic 
asylum, for aught the fourth-floor knew, and so vice versa. 
Sometimes, after a three or four years' sojourn, it is bruited 
about that in one of the garrets lives an old lady who has 
known Voltaire, Rousseau, and Pilatre de Rosier, has supped 
with Sophie Arnould, and danced with M. de Mirabeau. 
Sometimes (as happened the other day), a little old gentleman 
belonging to the second-floor, very fond of snuff-taking, and 
leaning on a stick, dies; and the neighbours hear, amazed, 
that the defunct is such a person as Don Manuel Godoy, 
prince of the peace, a man whose fame has filled all Europe, 
whose name (for good or evil) is in every mouth, whose 
memoirs are on every bookstall on every quay in Paris. 
Everybody has heard of the Hermit of the Chaussee d'Antin, 
and Paris is the only place where such a hermit could dwell. 
I should like to see a hermit in High Holborn, or New Bond 
Street ! Though the street door of our four-storied house 
stands wide open, the porter and the police are the sole 
depositaries of the secret of our whereabouts ; for which 



82 ■ FOUR STORIES. 






reason I would specially recommend one of our four stories to 
all persons fond of retirement or encumbered with, too 
numerous an acquaintance. 

But I, the indigent philosopher, whose vocation is to 
observe, and from the kennel of social peculiarities, fish, with 
the crook of reflection, queer fragments of life and manners — 
I, the ragged moralist, may know more about my neighbours 
than my neighbours about me. Perhaps I have won the 
porter over to my interests, perhaps I am one of that nume- 
rous, astute, indefatigable, but ill-paid class, the subordinate 
police spies of Paris. At all events I know my four stories 
by heart, and can (and hereby do) present a prose paraphrase 
of Beranger's jovial lyric, les quatres etages. 

To begin at the beginning : the house itself. It is an 
hotel with a small court- yard in the Rue Coquelet, which, as 
everybody ought to know, is in the historical Faubourg St. 
Germain. The Rue Coquelet is a silent street made up of 
similar hotels, interspersed with little milk shops, fruiterers', 
bakers', and wine shops. For a mile on every side extend 
equally silent streets, some half shops, half hotels, as ours ; 
others occupied solely by gloomy portes cocheres, through 
which, when they open (which is rarely), you may catch 
glimpses of gloomy hotels. Silent streets, little shrunken 
shops, gloomy gates, shabby little carriages, street -porters 
sleeping in the sun, devout old ladies trotting to early mass, 
stealthy priests gliding along in the shadow of the walls, 
Dukes and Marquises, chevaliers and abbes, yet abide there 
— black silk smallclothes, hair-powder, pig-tails, and satin 
calashes yet linger in its solemn hotels — but the ancien regime, 
the old school, is dying fast, oh ! how fast away. 

Our house, in the old times of wigs and rapiers, petit soupers 
and the droit de jambage, belonged to a Farmer-General of the 
French finances. John Law and the Mississippi scheme were 
the ruin of him, and he was forced to sell his house to 
Mademoiselle Catin of the Comedie Francaise, who suffered 
three months' imprisonment at the Madelonnettes for refus- 
ing to sup with the Cardinal Archbishop of Carpentras, 
and who subsequently married Milord Peef, " gentilhomme 
anglais," who was no other than Tom Pilfer, who turned 
his wife's four-storied hotel into a gambling-house, and had 



FOUR STORIES. 83 

here that famous duel with, the Chevalier de Rougeperd 
which compelled him to fly to America (with Mademoiselle 
Catin's diamonds), where the war of independence had just 
commenced, and where he was hanged at Saratoga Springs 
for deserting seven times backwards and forwards, in three 
campaigns. The community of St. Bumptious afterwards 
settled down in the hotel, where they set a brilliant example 
of orthodoxy to the neighbourhood, and burnt an octavo 
edition of the works of Jean-Jacques Rousseau with great 
solemnity; but the revolution of 1789 supervening, they 
were summarily ejected by a Republican chief of the 
sections, who gave a lecture every evening to a select 
assembly of fish- women, and administered justice to the 
aristocrats on the premises. He however retired, alleging 
that the monks had left so many fleas behind them that 
the place had become unbearable; and as the house had 
by this time got a bad name, it remained shut up and 
deserted till 1806, when, as it belonged to nobody in 
particular, the Emperor Napoleon conferred it on one of 
his senators, who furnished it from head to foot in marble, 
mahogany, crimson, and gold, had gilt eagles stuck on 
all the ceilings and over all the doors, and a portrait of the 
"Emperor" hung in every room. Came 1815, notwith- 
standing, and the downfall of the empire. The senator sold 
his house to a boarding-school master, who sold it to a dyer, 
to let it to a retired perfumer, who converted it into what 
it is now — an Hotel Garni, or furnished lodging-house, let 
out in separate floors and tenements like the " Flats " of a 
house in the old town of Edinburgh. 

Our house is of no particular form or shape, the four 
stories being piled one a-top of another, very much in the 
fashion of packing-cases in a railway booking-office. A certain 
number of rooms was what the architect seemingly had in 
view, preferably to symmetry of arrangement, so that if any 
order of architecture does prevail in our house, it is the higgle- 
piggledy. We have rather a superabundance of lath and 
plaster, £oo, compared with party walls, and in wet weather 
you had better look out of window as seldom a« possible, as 
there is a species of Penelope's web of waterspouts outside, 
which produce perplexing cascades from window to window. 

g 2 



84 FOUR STORIES. 

There is a porter's lodge just inside the porte cochere, 
within whose marble halls (stuccoed brick, in plain prose) 
the porter of the hotel has his abode. His name is Mon- 
sieur Stidmann, and to his high and responsible post of 
porter, he adds the supplementary calling of tailor. A print of 
the fashions for 1824 hangs over his porcelain stove, which, if 
the illustrative portraits thereof are to be taken as evidence, 
would prove him to be an adept in the confection of habili- 
ments for the dignitaries of the Church, the State, and the 
Army, of ladies' riding habits, and of liveries of the highest 
style and fashion. I rather think, though, that Monsieur 
Stidmann, if he ever exercised the above-named branches of 
the profession, has long since abandoned them ; for I cannot 
discover that he exercises any more important branch of the 
sartorial art, now, than the repair of dilapidated galligaskins, 
and other garments rent by accident or by age. I have even 
heard his skill asa" botcher" (if I may be allowed to apply 
that familiar term to the mystery of clothes' mending) called 
into question ; for M. Adolphe, the notary's clerk, on the 
fourth floor, assures me that, confiding to him, on an emer- 
gency, a dress coat for purposes of repair, he absolutely sewed 
a green cuff on to a black sleeve, besides leaving a box of 
lucifer matches in the left tail pocket, which together were the 
means not only of M. Adolphe' s becoming a subject for universal 
risibility to a select society in the quarter of the Marais, but 
also very nearly caused him to set fire to himself and the com- 
pany in the most critical portion of the Pastorale. Adolphe, 
to be sure, laughed at the mistake and forgave it ; but 
for reasons which I may afterwards feel myself called upon to 
explain. 

This unsuccessful tailor is always known as Father Stid- 
mann, probably from the habit the Parisians have of attribut- 
ing paternity to every man above the middle age, but he 
also rejoices in the appellation of father to Mademoiselle 
Eulalie Stidmann, a remarkably pretty little blonde (Stidmann 
is an Alsatian), eighteen years of age, who, to the confusion 
and envy of all the grisettes of the quarter, has lately aban- 
doned the little round lace cap, as distinguishing a mark of the 
grisette as the yellow head-dress of the Jews in Turkey, and 
has taken to wearing a real bonnet, in which, and with a roll 



POUR STORIES. 85 

of music under her arm, she goes daily to the Conservatoire de 
Musique, of which institution she is a pupil. Her generous 
father bought her a dreadful old square piano (Raclet, 1802), 
which I should like to see broken up for fire -wood, confound 
it ; but which she punishes tremendously every evening, 
setting Meyerbeer and Thalberg to hard labour till my ears 
are pierced through and through, and the old porter weeps 
with pride and pleasure. Besides the piano and the stove, 
and the print of the defunct fashions I have spoken of, the 
lodge boasts also a framed and glazed portrait of Beranger, an 
old caricature by Carte Vernet, representing some notable 
intrigue of some notable political personage, whose intrigues 
and whose notability have been smoke as his body has been 
dust, these thirty years ; and a print crimped like a fan, pre- 
senting at one point of view an effigy of Napoleon, and at 
another, that of the Due de Reichstadt. Above hang a rusty 
sword and cartouche belt (for Stidmann has served, and in the 
grand army too) ; round the pipe of the stove are twined some 
palm branches, which here remain from Palm Sunday to Palm 
Sunday ; and from nails on the wall hang two withered laurel 
wreaths, old trophies of prizes for good conduct and application, 
won by pretty little Eulalie when she was at school. Then, close to 
the door, a considerable portion of the wall is covered with the 
keys of the different occupants' castles, here deposited (if they 
like) when they go out ; underneath these is a little shelf for 
the respective wax night-lights (wax candles are cheap in 
France, and even the tenant of a garret would blush to con- 
sume vulgar tallow). Monsieur Stidmann is of an indefinite 
age, and has a face so seamed with the small pox, that it is 
all holes and knots like a cane-bottomed chair. I am inclined 
to think that he wears a fur cap, but I could not undertake to 
point out which is his cap, and which his natural head of hair, 
both are so curiously alike. He is a decent man to speak to, 
doing all sorts of things for you, and about the house, without 
ever seeming to move his short pipe from his lips or him- 
self from his stool, or a greasy number of the Constitutionnel 
from before his eyes. I think his political opinions verge 
towards Orleanism. Orleanists are good tenants, and give 
handsome New Year's gifts. Socialists he looks upon with 
abhorrence, as persons who run away the day before their rent 



86 FOUR STORIES. 

is due, and burn, in the composition of pestilential works, 
wax candles which they never pay for. A lodger without a 
trunk he always sets down, before-hand, as a rank Socialist. 
Carpet bags and republicanism are inseparably connected in 
his mind. He grumbles a little if you ring him up after 
midnight, and has a weakness for losing letters sent to you 
by post, and for telling you that somebody has called to see 
you a week or ten days after the visit has taken place. But 
this is an advantage if you wish to be retired. 

I can but spare a line to Madame Stidmann, who wears 
a preposterous cap, and is always muddling over a pot au feu 
or some other savoury dish, the smell of which continually 
pervades the lodge and its approaches. She has a rabid 
reverence for the memory of the emperor ; and, I am certain, 
must have belonged to the grand army, for she has the 
voice of a grenadier, and the walk of a sapper and miner, 
and swears like a trooper. I would rather not say any- 
thing more about her, here, for on a disputed question of 
reckoning once, she pursued me with a stew-pan, and she 
is a formidable person for a nervous man to deal with. 

At the door of our house stands, night and day, a little 
fellow about four feet seven inches high, with a terrific 
moustache, and clad in a greyish blue coat, brickdust-coloured 
trousers, gaiters instead of stockings, a black leathern belt 
round his waist, and a knapsack covered with something 
resembling the piebald top of a travelling trunk. He carries 
a musket and bayonet much taller than himself, and is full 
private in the hundred and fiftieth regiment of the line. It 
is not through any special merit or respectability possessed by 
our house that he is here stationed, but simply because in the 
first floor lives M. le colonel de la Gamelle, commanding the 
hundred and fiftieth, whose right it is to have a sentry at his 
door. 

The colonel is a stout, a very stout warrior, with grey 
whiskers and moustaches, and a wife who always puts me in 
mind of the giraffe at the Jardin des Plantes, for she has a 
meek eye, a distressingly long neck, and persists in wearing a 
yellow dress with crimson spots. They have one son, who is 
at the Lycee Louis le Grand now, and wears a semi-military 
uniform. He was born in Algeria, and nursed by a soldier's 



FOUR STORIES. 87 

wife. He comes home on Sundays, when his father gives 
him lessons in fencing, and in the broad-sword exercise ; and, 
in the evening, takes him to the cafe to play billiards or 
dominoes. When he is old enough he will go to the school 
of St. Cyr, or to the Polytechnic. His career is marked out 
plain enough. Born and bred, he will probably die in the 
purlieus of a barrack — the roll of drums in his ears, and 
harness on his back. As for the colonel, he rose from the 
ranks, and tells you so. Why should he be ashamed of being 
what Soult or Ney were, and what Bedeau and Reille have 
been ? Also his language savours a little of the guard-room, 
and he spits and swears a little too frequently in company. 
He is quite a different sort of colonel to the commanding 
officer of one of our regiments. He has neither cab nor tiger. 
He has his horse (found by the Government), but I doubt 
whether he knows the favourite for the next Chantilly cup, or 
has made up a book on the Versailles steeple-chase. He is, 
uneasy in plain clothes, which, to the British warrior, are 
garments of delight. He lives on his pay ; and, not having 
anything beside it to live on, does not eke out a supplementary 
income by betting, kite -flying, or horse- dealing. He knows 
every man in his regiment by name, and stops to speak to his 
privates in the streets, and rates them soundly if he finds 
them slovenly, or frequenting the wine-shop immoderately. 
They call him " notre colonel," and the kindly familiarity he 
entertains with them does not breed contempt, but rather 
love and affectionate respect. Yet I am bound to add, that 
colonel de la Gamelle is not, what we in England call, a 
gentleman. He is rough, boorish, and often brutal, in his 
manners ; he smokes a short pipe in his drawing-room ; and 
his only relaxation is the cafe, where, with other colonels, 
lieutenant-colonels, and majors, he plays innumerable pools at 
billiards for drops of brandy, just as the captains do in their 
cafes, and the lieutenants and sous -lieutenants in theirs. As 
for Madame, his wife, she is of a meek and somewhat lachry- 
mose temperament, and reclines all day on a sofa, reading the 
novels of the admired M. de Bakac. She is perfectly con- 
tented with her husband, whom she scarcely ever sees, but 
who always leaves her a touching souvenir in the shape of 
stale tobacco-smoke, which she bears with patience. The 



• 



88 FOUR STORIES. 

colonel's swords, kepis, burnouses, shabragues, Algerian pipes, 
camel-saddles, guard-papers, boots, and dressing-gowns, are 
strewed about the apartments in loving confusion with her 
caps, shoes, and paper-covered novels. She has a femme-de- 
chambre, Mademoiselle Heine, who has already refused a 
drum-major, but is suspected of a tenderness for one of the 
light company, who is attached to the colonel in the capacity 
of body- servant, and is eternally brushing a uniform coat in th 
yard, on a temporary gibbet formed of two broom-handles 

On the same floor as the colonel, but in a much larger 
suite of apartments, lives M. Ulysse de Saint-Flanim, forty-five 
years of age, decorated, wearing a white neckcloth, and living 
at the rate of fifty thousand francs per annum, which is a 
pretty high figure to exist on in Paris. Were a census-paper 
to be sent to him, I doubt whether he would not be puzzled 
as to what to describe himself. He is not a man of inde- 
pendent fortune, for he works like a carthorse. He is not a 
stockbroker, though he is every day on the Bourse, frantic 
with financial combinations, bursting with bargains. He is 
certainly not a shopkeeper, nor is he a merchant. He does 
not discount bills, though he is up to his neck in stamped 
paper at various dates. He does not borrow money, for he is 
always borrowing prodigious sums. He does not live by the 
play-table, for he spends half his gains there. He is one of 
those financial anomalies to which the revolution of 1830 
gave birth — a walking incarnation of agiotage, shares, divi- 
dends, and per-centage. He is a projector — a speculator. 
He is on a great scale (and avoiding the Court of Assize) 
what the immortal Robert Macaire was ; what the admirable 
Mercadet, of De Balzac (put into an excellent English dress 
in the "Game of Speculation"), was; what hundreds of 
eager, bustling, astute, unprincipled, successful men are this 
moment in France. He is a speculator. We can scarcely 
realise the character in England to its full extent, speculative 
as we are, for the English projector generally confines himself 
to one or two branches. The mammoth of the ring stakes 
his thousands on the chances of a horse race ; the mastodon 
of the Stock Exchange risks his tens of thousands in bonds 
and loans; the leviathan of the share-market leaps madly 
over railroads to plunge into gold mines ; the colossus of 



FOUR STORIES. 89 

Mark Lane gambles furiously in corn. These speculate in 
philanthropy ; those in religion ; these in sending treacle to 
Jamaica ; those in carrying coals to Newcastle. But M. de 
Saint-Flamm is all and everything. All is fish that comes to 
his net : wherever there is a chance (and where is there not ?) 
he speculates upon it. He speculates in asphalte pavements, 
in gold mines, railways, water- works, home and foreign funds, 
theatres, agricultural societies, winter gardens, newspapers, 
pleasure gardens, steam-boats, charcoal burning, loan con- 
tracting, marsh draining, and so on. He is chairman of an 
Association for marrying couples in humble life at reduced 
rates ; of a Company for conveying emigrants to California ; 
for supplying lucifer-matches at half the usual price ; of the 
" Literary Pantechnicon," or Society for publishing translations 
of Plato, Aristotle, Sophocles, and Xenophon, at two sous per 
volume. He is the sort of man that if you took him a pro- 
posal for extracting sunbeams from cucumbers, or supplying 
the blind with green spectacles, would clap down a provisional 
committee on the back of an envelope, and register the 
scheme before you could say Jack Robinson. 

I never knew but one Englishman who had the same 
Crichtonian aptitude for speculation. He was always, when 
he met you, going to borrow twenty-seven thousand pounds 
for the Duke of Seedyland, which must be had before seven 
o'clock this evening, by Jove ; and was the first newspaper 
proprietor who gave a gingham umbrella and a bottle of 
blacking to each quarterly subscriber. He broke his heart in 
an unsuccessful attempt to establish a soup kitchen in con- 
nection with a Dental Surgery for the Million and General 
Tooth-drawing Company, and I have never seen his equal. 

M. de Saint-Flamm's apartments are magnificently fur- 
nished. There might be a little more elegance, perhaps, and 
a little more good taste; but you could not find a greater 
profusion of gilding, crimson damask, marble-covered furni- 
ture, and plate-glass (taking space into consideration) any- 
where out of the Tuileries. There is a deluge of clocks, all 
of different size and make, which, as they all strike the hour 
at different times, produce a charming diversity of effect. 
Engravings of rather questionable taste and execution, 
enshrined in costly frames, hang on the walls. Porcelain 



90 FOUR STORIES. 

monsters and curiosities crowd the mantel-pieces and consoles. 
There is a circular table on claw feet, with a marble top, 
inlaid with Italian mosaics, like a tailor's book of waistcoat 
patterns. There are ottomans, causeuses, dormeuses, refine- 
ments of couches for every depravity of lolling, lounging, 
sitting, or reclining. Finally, there is M. de Saint-Flamm's 
bed-chamber (which he never sleeps in), a little paradise of 
Persian carpets, lion-skins, alabaster, and satin, and muslin 
curtains held up by gilt Cupids. The ceiling was painted by 
Henri Baron, and cost five thousand francs. A genuine 
Raphael hangs in the embrasure of the window, with a 
genuine Correggio as a pendant. M. de Saint-Flamm specu- 
lates largely in pictures. 

The speculator keeps a brougham, a cabriolet, an English 
groom, and a valet-de-chambre, who wears elaborately embroi- 
dered shirts, and whom I took for a marquis, meeting him 
on the stairs one day. M. de Saint-Flamm dines usually at 
the Cafe Anglais, or at the Rocher de Cancale ; but he gives 
sumptuous dinners, occasionally, at home (there is a kitchen 
in his suite of apartments), when some friendly duke lends 
him his cook, and he dazzles his guests with a gorgeous 
service of plate. He is a bachelor, but no man ever had a 
larger collection of three-cornered notes on pink paper than he 
has, nor possessed, I suppose, a larger female acquaintance. 
Is he rich ? Are the grand dinners paid for ? Is the furni- 
ture his own ? Ma foi, the questions are facile to ask, but 
difficult to answer. He is a speculator ; and though perhaps 
he may be worth a million of francs to-day, he may sleep in 
the debtor's prison of Clichy to-morrow. M. Stidmann looks 
upon him as a Croesus ; and, as I saw him throw a five-franc 
piece to a ragged little organ-grinder the other day, I don't 
think that he is avaricious. 

We must mount another flight of stairs, for we have to 
do with the second-floor lodgers. And imprimis, of these let 
me introduce M. le Docteur Jaconnet, a mild, pale, elderly 
young man, with a prematurely bald head, gold-rimmed 
spectacles, an olive-coloured surtout reaching to his heels, and 
a broad-brimmed hat. Each of his wan cheeks is ornamented 
with a scalene triangle of hay-coloured whisker, met at 
the apex by the straggling tufts of his straw-coloured hair. 



FOUR STORIES. 91 

He is blessed with, a wife, a sparkling little brunette from the 
Pays des Yosges, who has the olive complexion, the piercing 
black eyes, and symmetrically arched eyebrows of Lorraine, 
and who has borne him six children — all alive, all with shock 
heads of straw-coloured hair, and to find bread and soup for 
whom the worthy Doctor must, till lately, have been sorely 
puzzled. He was, when a medical student, one of the noisiest 
and most racketty in the Quartier Latin ; was the admiration 
of the grisettes, the terror of the Chaumiere, and the cynosure 
of cafes in the Place de l'Odeon, and the Rue de la Harpe. He 
wore the longest beard and the nattiest velveteen gabardine, 
with the broadest brimmed hat in the Quartier ; he was a dab 
at billiards ; a neat hand at smoking clay pipes to a jetty black ; 
an unrivalled singer of students' songs and chorusses ; and an 
adept at the difficult and ingenious art de tirer la carotte, or 
science of extracting (under pretexts of book-purchasing, sick- 
ness, or other extraneous expenses) more than the stipulated 
monthly allowance from the parents and guardians of the 
student. But when all his examinations had been passed, and 
he was received Doctor of Medicine, when he had sold his cornet- 
a-pistons, and broken his blackened tobacco-pipe, shaved off 
his beard, and, finally, buried the beer-imbibing dancing 
student in a decorous coffin of black broadcloth, with white 
wristbands and shirt front; when he had taken to himself 
a wife, and so become a respectable man with a definite social 
position, he found that there were yet several items wanting 
to complete his sum of happiness : namely, patients. He cer- 
tainly had an opportunity of studying infantile maladies in his 
yearly increasing family ; but the Quartier was an obstinately 
healthy one, or else he was not sufficiently known in it, for 
few or none came to invoke his healing knowledge. Our poor 
Doctor was almost in despair, and had begun to think of 
emigrating to Nouka-hiva, or turning travelling physician, in 
a red coat, a cocked hat, and top-boots, with a horse and gig, 
and a black servant, after the manner of the famous Doctor 
Dulcamara — when he was one evening summoned to attend 
M. de Saint-Flamm, who was suffering from a slight indi- 
gestion, brought on by eating too many truffles, washed down 
by too much Sauterne. He so effectually relieved that capi- 
talist, as to awaken within him something like a sense of 



92 ' FOUR STORIES. 

gratitude, patronising, of course, as from a millionnaire to a 
poor devil of a patientless physician, but which was produc- 
tive of good fruits. M. de Saint-Flamm took Doctor Jaconnet 
in hand; he " formed" him, as he called it. After debating 
whether his 'protege should resort to Homoeopathy or Animal 
Magnetism, he finally decided upon the Puff- Specific mode of 
obtaining popularity ; and one fine morning all the walls and 
posts in Paris were stencilled, and all the advertising columns 
of the newspapers inundated with high-flown announcements 
of the marvellous properties of the " Water of long life" of 
the Doctor en medecine Jaconnet. Since that period I have 
observed a sensible improvement in the dress and general 
appearance of the family ; whether they drink the Eau de 
longue vie themselves, or whether they profit by the sale 
thereof — (in family bottles, price twelve francs : none being 
genuine unless they bear the signature of the inventor, 
Paracelse Caraguel) — they are certainly much better for the 
water cure. Jaconnet' s colleagues call him a quack ; but, 
bless you, they have all their little specifics. Doctor Galen has 
an infallible paste for catarrh ; Doctor Hippocrates has a cure 
for the rheumatism ; and Doctor Esculapius one for corns and 
bunnions. Medical quackery, when unauthorised by a diploma, 
is so rigidly pursued, and so severely punished yi France, that it 
takes refuge, occasionally, in the ranks of the profession itself. 
The Doctor's neighbour on the second floor is one M. 
Bonfons, a retired perfumer, wearing the ribbon of the Legion 
of Honour — why, I am unable to tell, (the Doctor has got his 
scrap of red ribbon since the water of long life) — an old 
gentleman of intensely regular habits, a mild and placid 
demeanour, and, I should say, of some fifty years of age. He 
goes out every morning at the same hour, breakfasts at the 
same cafe off cafeau lait and a flute, or long soft loaf; takes 
a walk in the Tuileries gardens, or reads the papers in a 
reading room if it rains ; breakfasts d la fourchette at another 
cafe ; takes another walk on the Boulevards ; dines at the 
same traiteurs, and, generally, off the same dishes ; goes to 
another cafe, where he has strong coffee without milk and 
petit verre, the evening papers, two games at dominoes, one at 
piquet, and one glass of absinthe. Winter and summer he goes 
to bed at ten o'clock. He seems to have no relations, — no 



FOUR STORIES. 93 

friends, save coffee-shop acquaintance, and he appears to he 
perfectly happy. I dare say he is. 

The third floor of the Hotel Coquelefc is likewise divided 
into two tenements, in each of which lives a different tenant. 
Both are single ; one an old spinster, the other an old 
bachelor. Mademoiselle de Keraguel lives on the right hand 
side of the staircase. She is seventy years of age, and has 
been very beautiful once, and very unhappy. Her brother 
was a marquis of the old regime, and she comes from Brittany ; 
but she is the last Keraguel now. She has outlived friends, 
relatives, fortune, happiness, everything but religion. So she 
is what the Parisians call a devote. She goes to matins, 
complins, high mass, and vespers. She has an occasional 
assemblage of old friends in her plain salon ; two or three 
old priests, an old countess whose children were weaned from 
her by the guillotine, and a weasened old chevalier with 
the cross of Saint Louis. These she regales with tea and 
snuff. They talk politics of the year 1780, and of those 
subsequent to the year 1816. All intervening years are to 
them a blank. The reigning king is at Frohsdorf, as he was 
at Holyrood and at Goritz. With them Napoleon is always 
M. de Buonaparte ; Louis Philippe, the Duke of Orleans. They 
never mention the name of Robespierre, they speak of him 
as " lui" 

Mademoiselle de Keraguel has for neighbour an old 
gentleman with a bald and polished head, who would be one 
of the most amiable of mankind, were he not so enthusiastic 
a naturalist. He is as modest as a girl of fifteen, yet I elicited 
from him one day an admission that he was a member of 
half-a-dozen European academies, and had written half-a-score 
of erudite volumes on some much desiderated spiders, of 
which nothing but a portion of a fossil hind leg was as yet 
known to naturalists. It is precisely his erudition and enthu- 
siasm in the cause of science that render him so unpleasant a 
neighbour. He has a huge collection of live black beetles, 
the habits of which he is busy studying just now ; several 
tame snakes, an arsenal of spiders, some abominable blue- 
bottles, and some rare and hideous specimens of the lizard 
tribe, to say nothing of a Norwegian rat or two, and three 
Siberian toads. If he kept rabbits, cats, dogs, mice, owls, a 



94 FOUR STORIES. 

happy family of animals in short, we should know what to 
expect ; but it is in reptiles, vermin, noxious insects, that he 
delights. His loathsome lodgers crawl about the stairs ; 
they invade the sanctity of Mademoiselle de Keraguel's apart- 
ments ; they frighten Doctor Jaconnet's children, and drive 
the martial Madame Stidmann to a state of culinary frenzy. 

Ouf»! I am out of breath. Only one pair of stairs yet 
remain. One peep into the trim little chamber of M. Adolphe, 
the notary's clerk, who hopes to be a notary himself some 
day. He has a neat little bed in an alcove, a little bureau in 
walnut- wood, and a bookshelf on which repose his " Code 
Civile," his treatise on Roman law, his " Paroissien eomplet," 
&c. Adolphe is a decently conducted young fellow ; does not 
wear moustaches, smokes in moderation, makes quiet and 
unobtrusive love to Mademoiselle Eulalie, in the lodge below, 
and will be quite a model of a chief clerk when he is elevated 
to that responsible situation. 

I wish I could say the same of Timoleon Cassemajou, 
artiste-peintre, who occupies the next room. Of all the able, 
idle, witty, pipe-smoking, worthless professors of the fine arts, 
this lazy colossus with a red beard is the very king and 
kaiser. He would have won the prix de Rome at the Ecole 
des Beaux Arts, if he had tried, but he wouldn't ; he might 
make ten thousand francs a year by portrait-painting, but he 
won't ; he won't do anything save smoke, and fence with 
vagabond geniuses like himself, and lie on the bed in his 
boots, and scrawl careless, clever sketches on the walls. 

But enough of my four stories at present. There are other 
rooms to be visited, other sequestered little cabinets, such as 
where I, the scribe, dwell ; where sleeps the shabby little man 
in the green coat, of whose identity I was for a long time 
ignorant, but whom I ultimately discovered to be the pro- 
prietor of the house ; where works and sings, and sings and 
works, Mademoiselle Bijou, the dressmaker ; where hides (in 
misery I am afraid) Count Schalingski, the Polish refugee; 
where the mysterious man holds out who copies manuscripts 
and music, and finds out genealogies, and hunts up dates, and 
is a gentleman by birth, doing anything for a crust. Some day, 
perhaps, we shall change our lodgers, and I may have something 
more, and something better to tell you of the four stories. 



THE GEEAT HOTEL QUESTION: 

IN FOUR CHAPTERS. 

CHAPTER I. 

FRENCH AND SWISS HOTELS. 

Hotel nuisance, Mr. Albert Smith calls it, discoursing of 
English hostelries. But I say, " Question," thinking the 
point moot. 

There are not many men so thoroughly well qualified and 
entitled as Mr. Albert Smith is to advance an opinion (and in 
a cathedral manner, too) upon the three subjects obviously 
evolved from the Great Hotel Question ; namely, travelling, 
comfort, and cheapness. As a traveller, Mr. Smith must be 
intimately acquainted with every considerable hotel in Europe; 
from Misseris, at Constantinople, to the Hotel de Londres at 
Chamounix, which last appertains to him of course in fee, and of 
right as an appanage to his kingdom of Mont Blanc. It is 
barely possible that one or two Queen's messengers, a few com- 
mercial travellers, and an occasional sketching correspondent of 
the Illustrated London News may have surpassed the gentleman 
arrayed in the robe of ice, and crowned, long ago, with the 
diadem of snow, in the way of mere mileage ; but it would be 
difficult to find any rolling stone that has gathered so much 
instructive and amusing moss as Mr. Albert Smith. His poly- 
glot vocabulary of hotel signs must be of a nature to drive a 
countess's courier to despair ; and his passport must be vised and 
revised, till not a square inch of the original blank paper 
remains. 

Of the second subject — travelling — I would conceive him to 
be as excellent a judge as Mr. Clark, in his watchbox is, of 
the performances of the long-legged " cracks " at Newmarket, 
if we may take as evidence the Albertian conversion of the 
Mont Blanc room, at the Egyptian Hall (that former unsightly 
home for living skeletons, Hottentot Venuses, and Tom Thumb 



96 THE GREAT HOTEL QUESTION. 

dwarfs) into the snuggest and most elegant apartment, replete 
with, appliances for seeing, hearing, and enjoying a pleasant 
and rational entertainment. As for cheapness, who does not 
recollect Mr. Albert Smith's lively Reminiscences of a Cheap 
Tour ? I forget how much he went to Milan and back for ; 
but the sum total was something astounding in the annals of 
fiscal moderation. I remember, however, one passage, in 
which tact and generalship were admirably displayed. Jour- 
neying through Switzerland — unless I am mistaken — a halt 
took place, and the majority of the travellers adjourned to dine 
at the table- d'hote. Now, this Mr. Albert Smith knew or sur- 
mised to be indifferent in quality and extravagant in price. 
What did he do ? Why, instead of dining at the hotel, he 
went out and bought a pie and a bottle of wine ; and, while 
his companions were disbursing their five or six francs for a 
bad and dear dinner, he was enjoying his simple but succu- 
lent repast in view of the most delightful scenery in Europe. 
There is a profundity of viatorial experience and knowledge of 
the world in this performance that calls to my remembrance 
the act of another sage ; who, eschewing the expensive bill of 
fare of some mediaeval banquet, retired into a corner — likewise 
with a pie — and being rewarded for his abstinence and savoir- 
vivre, with the discovery of a rich and rare plum in the pasty's 
doughy depths, could not refrain from an expression of self- 
gratulation. Need I mention the lamented name of Horner ? 

But one cannot always dine on a meat-pie, especially in 
London streets, nor sleep on an iceberg : we must have hotels, 
hotel dinners and beds; and, seriously, this paper owes its 
composition to the perusal of a very succinct and sensible 
pamphlet on " English Hotels, and their abuses," by the 
kindly and keenly observant writer to whom I have just made 
allusion. 

What is an hotel ? I don't mean in the dictionary sense of 
the word : Ignoramus can tell me that without book (what a 
magnificent dictionary all that Ignoramus knows, and all that 
he doesn't know would make !) but what is an hotel in this 
year of grace, civilisation, and perfection ? What is it like — 
this mansion of mine, where I (and Mr. Albert Smith) expect 
to take mine ease, without having my pocket picked ; — the 
place where, the poet tell us, the traveller often finds his 



THE GREAT HOTEL QUESTION. 97 

warmest welcome ; where I have to sleep, and eat, and drink, 
and pay, and be received by landlords, and "Yes Sir-ed " by 
waiters, till the railway of life issues no more time-bills and 
the terminus is gained ? To what degree of perfection have 
we — ceaselessly rushing about the world, ceaselessly writing 
letters to the Times, ceaselessly adopting new systems, cease- 
lessly clamouring for comfort and cheapness — been able to 
bring the establishment in which we pass so large a portion 
of our restless lives. What is an hotel at this present day ? 

The hotel in Paris, what is that like ? I think it is a huge 
barrack of a place, no one knows exactly how many stories 
high ; because no one knows where the servants and waiters 
sleep ; their beds being always some nights above the loftiest 
occupied by any of the lodgers : far, far above the cinquieme. 
If ever you pass the palace of the Tuileries by night, and 
watch the lights glimmering from little casements one above 
another — still ascending, coruscating the slated roof, mingling 
with the chimney-pots, and at last shouldering the stars in the 
sky almost, and winking at them as if in companionship — 
you will be able to form an idea of the number of stories a 
first-class Paris hotel consists of. It must be more crowded 
than a palace (though occupying less space), since it frequently 
lodges a king or two on the first-floor, a sovereign duke on 
the second, and a Kamschatkan ambassador on the ground- 
floor, all with their respective suites ; and, in addition to the 
regular hotel lodgers fugacious and permanent, the hair- 
dresser, the tailor, and the boot-maker, who are announced 
to have their place of business dans V hotel. The building 
includes, of course, a vast jardin, a spacious court-yard, coach- 
houses and stables for the carriages and studs of the wandering 
English nobility ; a suite of apartments for the landlord and 
his family ; a smaller set for that dweller on the threshold, 
the lodge-keeper and his family ; a long range of kitchens 
and offices ; the public saloon for table-dlwtes (always adver- 
tised as the biggest in Paris), and, indispensably, a complete 
hummums, or pile of buildings devoted to hot and cold baths. 

All this is in a narrow street with no perceptible frontage, 
and hemmed in by tall houses, always threatening to topple 
over, always being pulled down by the authorities, and always, 
of course, Pour cause de prolongation de la Rue de Rivoli. The 



98 THE GREAT HOTEL QUESTION. 

"vast garden" is hemmed in by other tall honses; the hot 
and cold baths have an entrance in an alley, seemingly half-a- 
dozen streets off; and, when you have walked a few hundred 
yards in another direction, and turned to the right and the 
left, and think you are on your way to the Seine, you look up, 
and see a great blank wall staring behind a . barricade of 
chimney-pots, and stencilled high up, somewhere about the 
seventh heaven, that this is the " Grand Hotel des Empereurs 
Chinois ; " which you thought you had got rid of, but which 
you can't get rid of, and which follows you about and pervades 
all Paris. 

The number of clocks (all gilt, and with pedestals repre- 
senting groups from the Iliad or the ^Eneid, and all with thin- 
blown glass cases, which the chamberman breaks with the 
handle of his feather-broom, and you are charged a hundred 
francs in the bill for not breaking) — the number of clocks, I 
say, is simply incalculable ; because every apartment, from 
the drawing-rooni of the Kamschatkan ambassador on the 
ground-floor to the undiscoverable sky-parlours in the roof, 
occupied by the scullions and floor-polishers, has its clock on 
the mantelpiece. None of these clocks keep any time save 
their own ; which is a distracting, inconsistent, and hideous 
mockery of chronology. They make unearthly noises in the 
night-season ; sometimes as if they had swollen tonsils, some- 
times as though they were possessed by demons in their inner 
works. Invariably — at unseasonable times when you are in 
bed, and falling in or out of a refreshing sleep — the door is 
opened to give entrance to a strange man in a black velvet 
cap, who scrutinises you with a half-complimentary expres- 
sion, as if you were a new-found acquaintance ; half dispa- 
ragingly, as if he were a broker come to take stock of your 
personal effects ; but, on the whole, authoritatively, as if he 
knew that you owed or must owe him money, and he had 
your comfort and your luggage in his hands. This individual, 
armed with a great iron instrument of torture, proceeds to 
wind up the clock ; which doesn't seem to like the operation 
at all, and moans piteously ; then the mysterious operator 
shuffles out on his carpet slippers, and the clock goes worse 
than ever ; and you catch the next flying waiter who brushes 
past your door, and asking him who the clock-torturer is, are 



THE GREAT HOTEL QUESTION. 99 

told that it is Monsieur, by blue ; who is a sergeant in the 
national guard, a great frequenter of cafes, an ardent specu- 
lator on the Bourse, a revered authority at dominoes, and a 
complete nonentity and cipher standing for zero in the house 
of which he is landlord and proprietor. 

Yes, he is the landlord : although hitherto you have been 
accustomed to regard, as the supreme authority of the estab- 
lishment, Madame, the dressy young matron, in the gold 
chain and ribbons, who sits down-stairs, in the rosewooded 
and pier-glassed bureau, with a white-headed grandmother, 
probably ninety years old, on one side, and a blooming jeune 
personne demure (precisely dressed ; pretty and speechless) on 
the other, — a young person who works interminable crochet, 
and makes out endless bills of indictment against travellers, 
arraigning them for their culpable consumption of wax- 
candles and beetroot-sugar ; patiently awaiting the time when 
she shall be claimed hy some other clock- winder, domino- 
loving and c«/d-h.unting ; and, with her hundred thousand 
francs of dowry, go to occupy the bureaucratic throne of some 
other hotel. 

French hotel landlords seldom appear to you under any 
other guise than this. They wind up your clocks, and you 
see them no more till you don't pay your bill ; when they 
pursue you with the rigour of the law, and arrest you. I 
knew one landlord in one of the stateliest hotels in Paris who 
deviated from this rule. He was — no other term more refined, 
less idiomatic, will serve — an out-and-out swell. He had his 
brougham, from which I have often seen him stepping at the 
doors of expensive restaurants and boulevard shops, accom- 
panied by a lady in velvet, crinoline, ringlets, and jewels, 
followed by a little dbg in a paletot, and who was not the lady 
in ribbons whom I have seen in the bureau. He used to 
breakfast at a table by himself in the grande salle-a-manger, 
and drink the very best of wines, call off the waiter who was 
attending on me, and behaved just as if he were a real traveller 
who paid his bill. I met him one night in the orchestra- 
stalls of the Theatre Francais ; he was attired like the Mus- 
covite proprietor of many thousand serfs of the Ukraine ; and 
he looked at me with a vague superciliousness, as if it had 
occurred to him mentally, " I must have seen that (ca) some- 

h 2 



100 THE GREAT HOTEL QUESTION. 

where before ; lie may be, perhaps, one of the wandering 
aliens to whom I condescended to give hospitality in my pala- 
tial hotel ; but, at all events, that is evidently a thing of very 
little consequence ; has probably come to the theatre with an 
order, and I need not trouble myself as to who that may be." 

It may, perhaps, have been a judgment upon this excep- 
tional landlord that he failed shortly afterwards, and for some- 
thing huge in the way of thousands of francs. An arrange- 
ment, of a separation-from-bed-and-board description, took 
place between him and the legitimate proprietor of the ribbons, 
and he was so reduced that he was obliged to become chairman 
of an assurance company or director of a railway, or something 
penurious of that sort. 

This is the great Paris Hotel — with its suites upon suites 
of rooms ; its gilded and painted and satin-hung saloons for 
kings and ambassadors ; its mean little slices of bedchambers 
for bachelors and dependents (narrow make-shift apartments 
with beds in alcoves) ; beds with delightful spring-mattresses 
that send you up ceiling- wards, like Jack in the box, and 
sometimes tilt you on to the floor playfully ; which floor, being 
bees' -waxed and varnished to the polish of a mirror, affords 
you admirable opportunities for studying the art of in-door 
skating. You have a little scrap of carpet, seemingly torn 
from the bottom of a defunct Eastern Counties Railway 
carriage ; insubstantial chairs, clad in red velvet, — of course, 
a really comfortable arm-chair ; a most uncomfortable table, 
if you wish to write, for it is all legs and crossbars and has 
no available top ; a horrible little gulf, misnamed a fire-place ; 
where you incur sciatica in kneeling down to light the fire, 
and disease of the lungs in blowing the damp green wood. 
Perhaps, you succeed at last — after a despairing expenditure 
of time, patience, and fuel, and pulling up and down a little 
iron screen, or blower, which has the perversity of 5000 female 
imps, and sometimes will descend, and more frequently will j 
see you at Jericho first — in kindling a diminutive, sputtering 
little blaze, the major part of which goes up the chimney (and 
often sets it on fire), while the remainder deposits a modicum 
of caloric on the toes of your boots, and sends a momentary 
thaw to the tip of your frost-bitten nose once in a dozen hours. 
You have a chest of drawers, with a grand mahogany top, 



THE GREAT HOTEL QUESTION. 101 

but with all the rest sham — sham keys, sham drawers (to 
judge by their obstinate refusal to open), sham locks, and 
especially sham handles ; which last artfully pretend to give 
you a good purchase to pull open a drawer, and then come off, 
sarcastically, in your hands, and throw you backward. These 
interesting articles of furniture are plentifully provided with 
skirtings, bronze cornices, and sham veneering work, which 
tumbles off of its own accord to your destruction, and for 
which you are made to pay. 

With a nicely damped ceiling ; with partition- walls just 
thick or thin enough for you to hear your next-door neigh- 
bour every time he turns in bed, and for you to have the 
agreeable certainty that he has heard every word of your ill- 
tempered soliloquy on the subject of the fire ; with a wash- 
hand basin not much bigger than a pie-dish ; an ewer about 
the size of a pint pot, and two towels almost equalling, in 
superficial area and variety of hue of ironmould, the pocket 
handkerchiefs on which the flags of all nations are printed — ■ 
(by this hand, the very vast majority of continental hotel- 
keepers have not yet modified their views on the quantity of 
water necessary for purposes of ablution !) ; with a little dark 
dressing closet, utterly useless from its obscurity for any 
toilette purposes, but which is full of clothes' pegs, gloomily 
tempting Miserrimus, who has but one coat, to hang himself 
on one of the vacant pegs ; with in all seasons an insufficient 
quantity of sheets and blankets — the former of strange tex- 
ture and full of ribbed seams ; the latter a sleezy, cobwebby, 
hairy genus of coverlets, bearing very little resemblance to the 
stern but serviceable British Witney — with windows that never 
shut properly, and gauzy curtains that wave to and fro in the 
draughts like banshees ; with a delightful door, which if you 
happen to shut by accident from the outside, leaving the key 
inside, can never be opened till the locksmith — who most 
probably has his logement also dans Vhotel — is summoned and 
fee'd to pick the lock ; with never the shadow of a portman- 
teau stool ; with very seldom even an apology for a foot-bath ; 
but always with two gleaming wax-candles in bronze sconces, 
and haply, for another franc a-day, a cornice of artificial 
flowers round the ceiling, and your bed-curtains tied with 
silken cords in a true-lover's knot. All this you have. 



102 THE GREAT HOTEL QUESTION. 

Countless little dark corridors — now soup -smelling, now sewer- 
smelling, but always narrow, and with, highly polished floors — 
lead to these chambers of delight ; and what a gratification it 
must be to think that you can retain one of these paradises at 
so low a rate as three francs a day — that you are living in a 
first-class hotel, and that on the first floor there may be resid- 
ing the King of Candy (incog, as Count Sucre d'Orge), or the 
reigning Duke of Saxe Schinkelstein-Phizeiwitz in saloons 
with malachite doors and velvet hangings, and who have 
dinners of five-and-twenty covers served every day ? 

This is the great Parisian Hotel with its salle-a-manger as 
large as the Guildhall of many an English corporate town, 
and in decoration a repetition, on a grand scale, of the paint- 
ing, gilding, and polishing of the saloons above stairs. This 
is the Hall of the Table d'hote, where confiding travellers pay 
blithely their six francs, under the impression that they 
are partaking of a real French dinner, and of the ne plus 
ultra category. This is the field of the cloth of damask; 
and, from its extremities, issue the luxurious Tabagie, or 
smoking-room, with its marble cafe tables, and its emollient, 
elastic, velvet-draped divans ; also the salon, or drawing-room, 
for the ladies, where you are to find the vrai " comfort " Ang- 
lais, a floor nearly entirely carpeted, a fire-place with a real 
English grate, a real poker, tongs, and shovel, and an almost 
total absence of the two pervading household smells of Gaul, 
soup and cigar- smoke. They say the Tuileries is redolent of 
both odours ; I know the Luxembourg is, though that is but 
a palace turned into a picture-gallery ; so, who is to complain 
of the Great Hotel of the Chinese Ambassadors, if the perfume 
of the worst-grown and worst-manufactured tobacco in Europe, 
and of the fragrant but powerful pot au feu cling to it like the 
scent of the roses to the vase that is broken and ruined ? 

This is the Parisian Hotel with its great vestibule or entrance- 
hall leading to the grand double staircase (more bees' -waxed 
than ever, if perchance its steps be not of Sienna marble), 
and its balustrades of bronze scroll-work gilt, and its stair-rail 
covered with velvet. The vestibule is crowded with fault- 
lessly attired waiters, talkative couriers, pompous English 
flunkeys ; with, now and then, a flying figure in a white night- 
cap and apron from the culinary regions, or female domestic 






THE GREAT HOTEL QUESTION. 103 



employed in some back-stairs capacity (for she waits upon no 
guest), voluble in talk, heavy gold-earringed, and scarlet ker- 
chiefed head- encircled, as it is the wont of the French domestic 
womankind to be. There yet wants the bureau — a glass-case 
with rosewood panelings, hung with an armoury of keys and 
pigeon-holes with numbers over, and wax candles in brass 
candlesticks within them : the bureau where sit the ribboned 
lady with her relatives, whom you have heard of, passing the 
livelong day in one slow, grinding round of Rabelaisian 
quarter-hours, and drawing out those frightful little accounts 
which, when the feast is over, make men laugh no more. 
There needs also the double range of bells; some of which 
are always ringing, and are watched by a fat man in a blue 
apron, the indoor porter, who lazily nods his head to each 
oscillating tintinnabulwn ; and when the number seventy- two 
has rung himself into a frenzy of rage and impatience, calmly 
calls out to some placid waiter, who is collectedly cracking 
nuts in the sunshine, that he thinks the Numero soixante-douze 
is on the point of ringing his bell. 

Little more is required to complete the hotel tableau. Throw 
in a noble semi-circular flight of steps leading to the door ; 
with one or two Englishmen, either railway-rugged and 
vulgar, or shooting-jacketed and solemnly aristocratic ; the 
spacious court-yard, with more gossiping servants and cooks ; 
a row of neat, brougham -looking vehicles, or voitures bour- 
geoises, with the drivers all placidly asleep on their boxes ; an 
Auvergnat water-carrier ; a big dog ; a little boy in a go-cart ; 
with a black silk pudding round his head ; a knot of noisy, 
garlic-smelling, worthless interpreters and valets de place pre- 
tending to a knowledge of all languages, and conversant with 
none. Then the outer conciergerie or porter's lodge, smelling 
more of soup and smoke than the whole house put together, 
and giving forth sounds of a jingling piano and the hammering 

of pegs into boot-heels, and this is, I think, positively all ■ 

Stay, painter ! as a final dash of your pencil, depict me, hover- 
ing about — unobtrusively, but most observantly — a non- 
moustachioed man, spare in stature, mildewed in garb, 
forbidding in demeanour; who is not anything particular, 
and does not want to be thought anything particular, but who, 
for all that, knows where the Rue de Jerusalem is, who the 



104 THE GREAT HOTEL QUESTION. 

prefect of police for the time being is, where the commissary 
of police for the quarter has his bureau, and what is the daily 
pay of a mouchard, or gentleman attached to the spy depart- 
ment of police, in a purely friendly manner; who watches 
patiently over the movements of the guests at the great 
caravanserais; dispensing his silent courtesies in a most 
Catholic and impartial manner ; now playing the spy on an 
ambassador, and now prying into the affairs of a commercial 
traveller from Marseilles. 

There is, I take it, in the great French hotel, as in the 
great French palace, and in the great French nation itself, a 
wonderful mixture of the admirably great and the absurdly 
mean. From the sublime to the ridiculous there is but one 
step, we know ; but, in that excellent, generous, inconsistent 
land, the sublime and the ridiculous go arm in arm. Here, 
in England, we are either gloomily grand, sublimely stupid, 
or else squalidly, wretchedly, nakedly, low, paltry, and con- 
temptible. There is not one flaw in the aristocratic orthodoxy 
of Belgrave Square ; but there is not one sound inch in the 
rags of Church Lane, St. Giles's. With us it is either 
Mivart's or the Clarendon, and the Blue Pump or the Cadgers' 
Arms. But in France, the high and the low, the gorgeous 
and the ragged, the blouse and the embroidered coat, the 
palace and the hovel, the bees' -waxed oak and the bare red 
tiles, are all mixed in a marvellous and incongruous salad. 
Give me the grandest hotel, the stateliest mansion, that Paris 
can boast of, and I will find you, within eyeshot of the gilt 
and frescoed saloons, holes and corners such as we would not 
lodge an English hound in. Among appliances of the most 
exquisitely advanced civilisation, peeps out a want of common 
cleanliness, of common household ABC. To the waiter, 
accomplished as a marquis, succeeds a man to make your fire 
and bed, who is not only a boor, but has a considerable spice 
of the savage in him. The carved and bronzed locks drop off 
for sheer rottenness ; the mother-of-pearl handled knives won't 
cut; the gilded and paneled doors won't shut; the whole 
reminds me of a stately volume magnificently bound and em- 
bossed, and printed on superfine paper ; but full of the grossest 
typographical errors. 

This is the great Parisian, and, with very trifling variations 



THE GREAT HOTEL QUESTION. 105 

in Italy and Germany, the great continental hotel ; which we 
are to take for a model and cynosure in onr reform, or rather 
revolution, of our own cumbrous, uncomfortable, expensive, 
extortionate English hotels. But I am not retained on either 
side as yet. I am neither Rowland, Sergeant, nor Oliver, 
Q.C. My task is to portray, not to argue. 

There is the second-class Paris Hotel, scarcely inferior in 
size to the home of the Chinese ambassadors ; but minus the 
gilding, bees' -waxing, and artistic decorations. The deficiency 
is amply made up, it must be admitted, by an additional 
hundred and fifty per centum of villainous odours, horrible 
uncleanliness, and ignorance of the rudiments of comfort. The 
second-class Paris hotel is the first-class provincial one ; and I 
say advisedly, that in such hotels, in Paris, Marseilles, Rouen, 
Bordeaux, Lyons, Amiens, there are landlords whose notions 
of soap, water, mops, and flannels, are not much above those 
of a half-caste Indian — the dirtiest specimen of humanity I 
can call to mind ; whose dinners are villainously cooked and 
filthily served, and whose charges are so exorbitant that the 
traveller of imaginative temperament might, by a trifling 
exercise of fancy, assume himself to be in a cave of robbers 
such as the Seigneur de Santillane has described and Salvator 
Rosa has painted. 

The Students' Hotel in Paris is simply a den. Here, red 
tiles for flooring revel ; here, a toothbrush would be looked 
at with about the same ignorant curiosity as the pocket-mirror 
of Pharaoh's daughter. Dirt — genuine, unadulterate, unin- 
fluenced-by-English-alliance dirt reigns supreme. Ask any 
medical student who has varied his studies at Guy's or Bartho- 
lomew's by an anatomical excursion to the Clamart. Ask him 
which he prefers ; Lant Street, Lower East Smithfield, Chiswell 
Street, Nassau and Charles Streets, or the Rue St. Jacques de 
la Harpe, de l'Ecole de Medecine, and the Place de l'Odeon ? 

Boulogne, Calais, Havre, Dieppe, Cherbourg, being watering- 
places much in vogue with pleasure-seekers and invalids both 
French and English, have another species of hotels. They are 
large, roomy, airy, cheerful, elegant ; and, with some excep- 
tions — foremost among them, the excellent " Hotel des Bains " 
at Boulogne — intensely uncomfortable. Comfort, to be sure, 
is not much wanted under a broiling July sun in the height 



106 THE GREAT HOTEL QUESTION. 

of the bathing season ; but I can conceive no more lamentable 
picture than that of a chilly English traveller shivering in one of 
the dear big bed-rooms of an " Hotel de la Couronne" ; a 
room pierced with doors everywhere save where it is pierced 
by windows : the walls papered in a pattern resembling one 
of Mr. Albert Smith's own Mont Blanc placards — all icicles 
and snow-drops ; the waves howling outside like an ogre for 
the blood of those that go down to the sea in ships; the 
searching wind peering into every nook, and cranny, and 
crevice, like a custom-house officer, or a raven, or an ape. 

Of the purely English hotel abroad, the less said, I think, 
the better. The worst features of the continental s}^stem are 
grafted upon the worst features of the English ; the cheapest 
foreign things are charged for at the dearest home rates ; and 
the result is, the enriching of the knave, and the despair of 
the dupe. You have, to be sure, the consolation of being 
swindled in your own language by your own countrymen, and 
of being bitten into frenzy by vermin that may, haply, have 
crossed the Channel in British blankets. You have also an 
opportunity of witnessing how kindly the rascality of dear old 
England will flourish on a foreign soil ; how a dirty, inat- 
tentive, clumsy, uncivil English waiter will put forth stronger 
blossoms of those desirable qualities abroad ; and you are 
initiated into quite a new phase of the mysteries of foreign 
exchanges by learning that an English sovereign is worth 
about fifteen francs French money, and an English shilling 
somewhere bordering on ninepence halfpenny. 

I have been thus prolix, and perhaps prosy, on the. theme 
of French hotels, because in their chiefest features they are 
identical with the hotels of the other parts of Europe. But 
this survey is cosmopolitan, and must not be confined to one 
country. 

What has the land of Alp and glacier, chalet and chamois, 
flat watches and Ranz des Vaches, done, that it is not to have 
its hotels mentioned ? They are, I take it, in many respects 
superior to, in many wofully beneath, their French neigh- 
bours. Spacious, well-aired, and cheerf ul they are certainly ; 
often elegant ; always possessing, and vauntingly too, a 
certain outward and visible cleanliness that is not always, alas ! 
borne out inwardly. The table-dlwtes are crowded, are con- 



THE GREAT HOTEL QUESTION. 107 

versational, spruce, modish, and excellent in quality ; but to 
me they are Barmecide feasts. The truth is, that, with the 
exception of Germany, where the bill of fare gives me an indi- 
gestion, I never could get enough to eat abroad. I am not a 
glutton. Perhaps I am nervous, and don't like to ask for 
things. I have paid high prices, and sat at boards of almost 
innumerable courses ; yet I never could obtain a thoroughly 
satisfying meal. There are epergnes full of sham flowers ; 
there are waxen fruits on pseudo-Sevres dishes (I saw a stopped 
clock on a table-dlwte once) ; there is a grave waiter in even- 
ing costume for the soup ; there are men in livery to take 
away your plate. 

Most people are acquainted with the theory about Switzer- 
land. It is held by scientifically travelled men, that the 
thirteen cantons are, in winter-time, tracts of country as flat 
as Holland, and as bare as a Siberian steppe. The inhabitants 
burrow under the ground like moles ; and they pass their time 
in practising their factitious Ranz des Vaches, learning to pre- 
tend that the}'- are expiring of home-sickness, and making- 
musical snuffboxes and flat watches. They are visited occa- 
sionally by their friend and patron, Mr. Albert Smith, who 
teaches them how to make toys in carved wood, and brings 
them prints of sham Swiss costumes from Paris, against the 
summer masquerading time. When the tourist season is about 
to commence, Mr. Beverly and Mr. Danson, from the Surrey 
Zoological Gardens, send over a staff of scene-painters and 
carpenters ; and the Switzerland of travellers, of dioramas, 
and of landscape annuals, is built up. The toy chalets are 
put together like huts for the Crimea, or houses for Australia ; 
valleys are excavated by Messrs. Fox and Henderson ; the 
mountains are " flats," the rocks "set pieces," the cataracts 
canvas on rollers. Mr. Murray's Guidebook-maker is in the 
secret, and writes the bill of the performance ; and Mr. Gunter 
does Mont Blanc by contract. As for the guides and chamois- 
hunters, after the Italian opera season is over, and no more 
"supers" are wanted for Guillaume Tell, or the Donna del 
Lago, their services are very easily secured at two francs a-day 
and their travelling expenses. Mr. Nathan the Fancy-Bali 
Costumier finds the wardrobe ; a good stock of the villainous 
Swiss coinage — batzen and rappen — is obtained from the 



108 THE GREAT HOTEL QUESTION. 

marine store shops about Drury Lane ; and the proprietor of 
Womb well's menagerie kindly lends a few real chamois and 
dogs with goitres. There is a grand dress rehearsal of " Swit- 
zerland as it isn't " just before the prorogation of Parliament ; 
and then the thirteen cantons are ready for the avalanche of 
lords, invalids, Cambridge tutors, Oxford undergraduates, 
French countesses, German barons, travelling physicians, land- 
scape-painters, fashionable clergymen, old maids, and cosmo- 
politan swindlers. 

But, as this grand Spectacle costs a great deal of money, 
the wary Swiss set about recovering their outlay by erecting 
gigantic hotels : for this they have illimitable table-dliotes : 
for this they issue advertisements in execrable English to 
entrap unwary voyagers : for this they retain bands of touters 
■ — not the ragged wretches who besiege you at the custom- 
house doors in seaport towns, who fight like wolf-cubs for 
your luggage, and yell hoarsely, " Hotel d'Angleterre ! " 
" Hotel des Princes ! " " Ver good Inglis Otel, Sare ! " — but 
civil, well-dressed, well-bred villains, male and female, who 
travel with you by rail and steamboats, who meet you in 
reading-rooms and on mountain summits, who are baronesses, 
artists, widowers, citizens of the world, veuves de la grande 
armee, single married ladies who have lost all they possess in 
the service of "la branche ainee" and sigh for the return of 
the heaven-born Henry Cinq. They know all the sights, all 
the legends and traditions, all the best wines ; and they (con- 
fidently, mind you) advise you, if you want really good 
accommodation at a most reasonable tariff, to put up — 
" descend " is the word — at the " Belvedere," or the " Trois 
Couronnes," or the " Goldener Drachen," at such-and-such a 
place. Curiously, they always happen to have a card of the 
particular hotel about them. Accidentally, of course. 

The Swiss have been renowned for ages as adepts in the art 
of war. But the Helvetian Gasthof keepers know, or at least 
practise, only one military manoeuvre ; that is — charging. 
They charge like Chester; they are " on " to you like Stanley. 
They would pick the bones of Marmion as clean as dice. Charge ! 
the Guards at Waterloo, the Irish at Fontenoy, the Dutch 
troopers at Aughrim, the Six Hundred at Balaklava, — none of 
these charges could approach the exterminating onslaught of 



THE GEEAT HOTEL QUESTION. 109 

the terrible Swiss landlord-landsknechts. You are too glad to 
escape with your minor baggage, and leave your military chest 
behind you. You look at the bill, in after days, as you would at 
a gazette after a battle, gorged with the list of killed, wounded, 
and missing £ s. d. Few men have the courage to read a 
Swiss hotel bill straight through, or even to look at it in its 
entirety. The best way to take it, is by instalments ; folding 
it into slips like a large newspaper in a railway carriage. 
Read a few items, then take breath. Read again, and grumble. 
Read again, and swear. Then, make a sudden dive at the 
sum total, as at a hot chestnut from a fire bar. Reel, turn 
pale, shut your eyes, clench your teeth. Pay, and go thy 
ways; but to the " Belvedere " no more. 



CHAPTER II. 

GERMAN HOTELS. 

A German hotel I take to appear in three distinctive phases. 
There is, first, the watering-place hotel — let us say, the "Gross- 

: Herzog Albrecht," at Saxe-Roulettenburg. 

It is the building in the little capital of the Duchy ; for the 

I Grand Duke never could raise money enough to finish his 
freestone palace on the Eselskopf-platz, and lives chiefly at a 
shabby little hunting -lodge, in a forest, with turrets like 
pepper-boxes, and walls like those of a raised pie. Albrecht- 

. Maximilian the nineteenth — whose privy purse it would be 
emphatically filching trash to steal — derives a large portion of 
his revenue from the " Gross-Herzog," not, perhaps, from the 
actual hotel department of the establishment, but from certain 
succursal institutions under the same roof, to wit, the " Kur- 
saal"; comprising dancing, conversation, and reading saloons ; 
together with two gaily-decorated apartments, which you 
would take to be the most innocent chambers in the world, 
but which nevertheless lead straight down to — well, to the 
infernal regions ; for there are played the infernal games of 
the trente-et-quarante and roulette. Brauwer and nephew are 
the landlords of the hotel, and the lessees of the adjacent 



110 THE GREAT HOTEL QUESTION. 

inferno ; and a very handsome royalty they pay to the nine- 
teenth Albrecht. I know we have some peers of the realm in 
England who are coal-merchants, and some deans and chap- 
ters not above receiving rents for the dens where thieves 
dwell ; but I don't think any member of onr royal family 
has condescended to go snacks in the profits of a gambling- 
honse yet. 

The " Gross-Herzog " needs be a splendid edifice, for it is 
the resort of the flower of Europe, both aristocratic and finan- 
cial. About the month of August in every year, the most 
astonishing symptoms of ill-health begin to manifest them- 
selves in families whose members have more money than 
they know what to do with, and doctors, with extraordinary 
unanimity, concur in recommending, as the certain and only 
cure, the famous baths of Saxe-Roulettenburg. The affection 
is quite cosmopolitan, being felt simultaneously by blase 
Russian nobles in the far north, who forthwith importune the 
Czar for an exeat to travel ; and by nankeen-clad Planters, 
enervated by a long course of tobacco chewing and gin-cock- 
tails in the recesses of the Old Dominion and South Carolina. 
No home chalybeates can approach the medicinal virtues of 
Saxe-Roulettenburg ; so, hither they come, to the great 
pleasure and profit of Herren Brauwer and nephew, the in- 
crease of the grand ducal revenues; and, through him of 
course, though indirectly, the greater glory of the Germanic 
Confederation. 

I cannot help alluding to the annual August malady as 
curious. But the most curious thing of the whole is, that at 
the selfsame time all the chief rascals in Europe begin to feel 
ill too. I don't mean the dirty, ragged, penniless, rascals ; 
but the well-dressed scoundrels, with travelling carriages and 
cheque-books. They — who have no right to have any lungs 
at all, and have certainly no hearts — suddenly grow nervous 
about their respiratory organs, and they too are off to Roulet- 
tenburg. Then there is such a getting up-stairs, with 
portmanteaus and carpet-bags in the " Gross-Herzog" ; such 
a playing of quadrille bands in the "Kursaal"; such a 
rattling of rakes and turning of wheels in the gambling- 
rooms ; such laughing, flirting, dancing, dicing, duelling ; 
such a delightful salmagundi of pleasure, and elopement, and 



f 
THE G±tElT HOTEL QUESTION. Ill 

love, madness, Rhine-wine, swindling, squandering, tying, 
cigar-smoking, boar-hunting, landscape-sketching, and suicide, 
that you might fancy Vanity Fair, as the Pilgrim saw it, come 
again. Only, Christian does not come that way, and Hopeful 
has long since given up the place as a bad job. 

Looking at it in a purely hotel point of view, the " Gross- 
Herzog " leaves little to be desired. There are music-rooms, 
billiard-rooms, morning parlours, evening saloons. There 
are two amply-spread tables-dliote a-day; the first at one 
o'clock in the afternoon, for the natives, who are early feeders; 
the second at half-past five, for Ihe foreigners. The fare is 
abundant and substantial ; a little too sour in some instances, 
perhaps ; a little too greasy in others ; a little too powerfully 
smelling altogether. But there are a great many courses : 
and, as long as you steer clear of the fish, and studiously avoid 
the pastry (which is cold shot in the guise of dough), and 
give the sauer kraut a wide berth, you may fare sumptuously. 
For the Rhine wines are excellent, the fruits delicious, the 
meats tender and well-flavoured. You can get even beef. 
The bedrooms are light and airy ; the waiters (though 
obstinately opposed to washing) are civil and obliging ; and 
the head- waiter, or Herr Oberkellner, is a majestic-looking 
man, with a ring on his thumb and a watch in his fob ; of 
whom there is a tradition among the servants that he is a 
born baron, and who is so grave, so erudite in appearance, so 
metaphysically mysterious, that you would not be at all sur- 
prised if he were to turn out some day to be Professor 
Busschwigg of the University of Heligoland, and bring you a 
thesis on the non-existence of matter instead of your bill. 

One feels inclined to go with Mr. Albert Smith to the full 
tether of his advocacy of German hotels ; at least, while the 
bathing season at the " Gross-Herzog " lasts. I know no 
French hotel that can at all compare with it for cheerful 
elegance. This is the life I lead there. I have a spacious 
chamber in an airy corridor, not too high up. The furniture 
of my room is handsome, but substantial. I have a big bed 
with an eider-down quilt (they don't give you the regular 
German doubled feather-bed at the G. H.) ; there are pictures 
on the walls, representing subjects full of the sly, obese, 
rather cruel-humour, which distinguishes the Teutons — school- 



112 THE GREAT HOTEL QUESTION. 

masters discovering boys robbing orchards; old ladies dragging 
ont hussars by the ear from nnder the kitchen-dresser; trouts 
and pikes facetiously angling for human sportsmen; elephants 
sportively overturning their howdahs and playfully kneeling 
on their drivers. The Germans like these snug little practical 
jokes. Wherever I go about the hotel, there is music ; a 
brass band on the terrace, a blind clarionet-player at the back 
of the house ; a harp and violin in the court-yard, and half-a- 
dozen pianofortes in as many private sitting-rooms. A waiter 
off duty is practising the accordion in a summer-house; and a 
white-capped cook, whose hour of returning to penal fires is 
not yet come, is leaning out of a window, gravely whistling a 
motivo from the First Walpurgis Night. There is music on 
all sides, from the horn of the omnibus conductor, executing 
a lively fantasia as the ramshackle old vehicle sets off for the 
railway-station ; from that solemn, pudgy little boy who is 
sitting on a doorstep and composedly thwacking a tambourine, 
instead of going to school ; from the two carpenters who are 
sawing beams in a half-finished house, and who suddenly 
knock off work, place their arms round one-another's necks, 
strike A natural with a tuning-fork, and break out into a 
trinkliedy singing first and second with admirable correctness ; 
and when the duet is concluded returning to their labour, as 
if choral-carpentry were the most natural thing in the world. 
Yv^ere my tympanum sensitive enough I might hear, I dare 
say, the stout- ankled, fubsy, ruddy, yellow-haired, German 
maidens singing in chorus as they wash their linen in the 
little river Knaster ; the Lifeguardsmen of his Impecuniosity, 
the Grand Duke, growling forth bass ballads as they black 
their jack-boots; nay, even the melancholy- winding cor-de- 
chasse of his Impecuniosity' s chief jdger, as the Grand Ducal 
hunting-party set forth from the Schloss in the forest to track 
the wild boar. They say his Impecuniosity makes five hun- 
dred a -year by consigning his hams to the English market. 

Surely Germany is the Own Home of music. The bells at 
the horses' collars, the snuff-boxes, the clocks, the children's 
toys ; all play some tune or other. All the people — save the 
deaf and dumb — sing and whistle ; and, as for the birds, I 
never heard the feathered choristers to so much advantage in 
any other part of the continent. The hours I have passed in 



THE GREAT HOTEL QUESTION. 113 

Germany, lying on my back, under a tree, and listening tc 
the birds ; — the pounds of tobacco I have smoked for the sake 
of the skylarks ; the castles I have built in the air ; the 
bottles of Hochheimer I have drunk in the morning, because I 
have heard the nightingale the night before — \re not these 
all written in the Book of Pleasant Memories? — the book 
clasped, locked, sprucely bound, gilt-edged, that stands side by 
side in the mind's library, with the great black book of things 
that should never have been. 

Back to the " Gross-Herzog : " a week there will chase 
away all your splenetic humours ; be they as numerous as an 
Englishman's in a French vaudeville. I have described my 
chamber. In the morning I take my walk into the delightful 
country, and watch the blue smoke of my cigar, curling and 
eddying in relief against the great black belt of forest in the 
distance. Then I join the early crowd of promenaders at the 
Marguerite Fontaine, and wish I were Lavater, or Gall, or 
Spurzheim, that I might found some arguments upon the wond- 
rous countenances in every variety of grimace that are swal- 
lowing the abominable ferruginous water at the hot-springs. 
Heaven help us ! What mountebanks we are ! How we 
catch at the frailest straw of an excuse to be able to indulge 
i in our pet vices ! I do belieye that if I had a well, and could 
contrive to keep a constant stock of rusty keys in it, or any 
other substance that would make the water permanently 
i nasty ; if I could afford to build a neat ridotto, casino, kursaal 
9 near it, with every appliance for flirting, leg-shaking, and 
gambling, and hire a quack to write a pamphlet about 
j he medicinal virtues of my spring, I — or you — or Jack 
Pudding yonder, would have as crowded a gathering as the 
l " Gross-Herzog " attracts every year. Yes, and the people 
; will know me to be a humbug, and the pamphlet a lie, and 
the rusted iron water a blind ; but they will come and make 
my fortune all the same. That fellow who used to sell straws 
with seditious songs in the good old Sidmouth and Castlereagh 
i times, was a philosopher. Dear me, sell us but one blade of 
morality, one little ear of pious chickweed, and we will accept 
1 a whole stack of wickedness — free gratis. When I see the pure- 
i; minded aristocracy gambling for dear life at German spas, 
b under sanitary pretences, I think of the straws and the sedition. 

i 



114 THE GREAT HOTEL QUESTION. 

During the rest of my day I behold Palsy ogling under 
pink bonnets ; barege muslins flirting with scoundrelism in 
lacquered moustaches ; eighty years and eighty thousand 
pounds in a Bath chair, besieged by a fortune-hunter ; your 
tailor with a valet-de-chambre and a courrier ; your wife's 
milliner in ruby velvet ; the English peerage punting for half- 
crowns ; blacklegs running on errands for Duchesses ; ballet- 
dancers making Russian princes greater slaves than their own 
serfs ; French actresses enjoying more of the revenues of Lord 
Muffineer's broad acres than would furnish marriage-portions 
for all his daughters ; French feuilletonistes living at the rate 
of two thousand a-year, and trying to believe that they have it ; 
English barristers persuading others that the fatigue of the 
practice (which they never had) has rendered the baths of 
Saxe-Roulettenburg essential to their health ; dissenting dow- 
agers findkig the chances of the rouge and the noir superior 
in excitement to the sermons of the inspired Habakkuk Goose- 
call of Tiglath-Pilesar chapel — these are the sights and people 
you see at the " Gross-Herzog." You sit opposite them at 
the table-d'Jwte, and their contemplation is more nourishing 
than the five-and-twenty courses. What a delightful, wicked 
masquerade it is. "What is the Grand Opera with its debar- 
deurs, hussars, titis, vivandieres, cossacks, Robinson Crusoes, 
Incroyables and Pierrots, in comparison with this travestie ? 

One word before leaving the naughty little place. Is the 
"Gross-Herzog" comfortable? On my word, I think very 
few people have ever taken the trouble to ask even themselves 
that question. There is such a continuous round of amusing 
folly, gaiety, and excitement ; you lose and win so much 
money ; you fall in love (or out of it) so often, that you have 
really no time to inquire whether the doors and windows are 
properly fastened, whether the chimneys smoke, or the sheets 
are well aired. For the same reason, although Herren 
Brauwer and nephew stick it on very heavily in the bill, 
no one cares to dispute the items. "What does it matter to 
Captain Flash, who has just won eighteen hundred Napoleons, 
whether he has been charged two floriDs for a bottle of 
Cognac or six ? Especially, how does it concern the captain, 
should he be charged even ten florins for the same, when, 
after an unlucky night at rouge et noir, in which he has lost 



THE GREAT HOTEL QUESTION. 115 

all, lie has been obliged to borrow Captain Raff's passport 
and run away to Frankfort, without paying his bill at all ? 
No definite judgment can be passed on the degree of comfort 
attainable at the " Gross-Herzog ; " for nobody stops there in 
winter-time. It is believed that Brauwer and nephew go to 
Paris, where they dine at the " Cafe de Paris," and pass 
themselves off as Moldo-Wallachian Waywodes. The " Kur- 
saal " is deserted, the natives break in upon the table-cVhote, 
and in revenge for the French cookery of the season, hold 
Saturnalia of cabbage-soup and suet-puddings ; the croupiers 
practise the flute, and the waiters play at roulette for silber- 
groschen and button-moulds. My friend Niggerlegge, formerly 
of the Buffs, who has lived over the tobacconist's shop in the 
Boodelstrasse at Saxe-Roulettenburg for ten years, and makes 
three pounds a-week the year round at rouge (the only income, 
in fact, that the worthy man has to live on) — Niggerlegge tells 
me that, if a chance traveller alights at the " Gross-Herzog " 
in the winter-time, the waiters fall upon and embrace him : 
the Life- Guardsmen at the palace present arms to him as he 
passes ; the band serenade him ; and the oberkellner lets him 
have for a florin a-day the gorgeous suite of apartments 
occupied during the autumn by her Serene Highness the 
Dowager Duchess Betsy-Jane of Bavaria. It is something to 
sleep in a Grand Duchess's bed ; but then it costs you some 
six florins a-day in fuel to keep the enormous rooms at 
anything like a comfortable temperature. 

The second class of German hotels are found in the towns, 
not the watering places. The hotel of " Der Konig von 
Cockaign " may be in the ancient German town of Lie- 
berschweinsgarten. It is on the Dom-Platz — that ancient, 
gloomy, jagged-paved expanse, hemmed in by tall, frowning, 
many-casemented houses, and dominated by the old cathedral 
— like a tall carved cabinet in stone, which was built, as the 
legends tell, by Frederick the Wicked, assisted of course by 
the devil, and will never be finished till the Lust-Berg — that 
lofty mound outside the town, cast there one night by Satan 
in a frolicsome mood — tumbles bodily into the river Schnapps- 
undwasser. The " Konig von Cockaign " — who is depicted 
on a swinging sign in the costume of a landsknecht in com- 
plete armour, with a tremendously rubicund nose, and mounted 

i 2 



116 THE GREAT HOTEL QUESTION. 

on a white charger like a rampant beer-barrel — -is goodness 
knows how many centuries old. Walter Biber, the landlord's 
father, kept it in the time of the French invasion, when it 
was sacked by a disorderly squad of republican grenadiers. 
It looks as if it could stand a stout siege now. Walter Biber's 
great grandfather entertained the Elector of Hanover there, 
on his way to England to assume the crown. There, it is 
said, the great Guelph ate the last bad oyster which was to 
pass his royal lips in Vaterland. Walter Biber's great great 
grandfather may have lodged Wallenstein in his rambling old 
inn, and have been threatened by Max Piccolomini with the 
loss of his ears for bringing him an extortionate bill. Walter 
Biber keeps the " Konig " himself now. He is a villain. He 
is a fat, scowling, shock-headed old man, with a face covered 
with warts, a cap with a green shade, and a wash-leather 
waistcoat. He is a widower, and childless. He had a nephew 
once (all German hotel-keepers have nephews) — young Fritz 
Mangel wurzel, his sister's son. This youth offending him, on 
a disputed question of over-cheating a traveller, he formally 
renounced and disinherited him, to the extent of refusing him 
bread, salt, a feather-bed, beer and tobacco, which are the 
sacramental elements of German hospitality ; and, after depri- 
vation of which, nothing can be done. More than this, he 
complained of him to the senate of the town ; and Fritz, being 
very unpopular with the burghers, and too popular with the 
burghers' wives, the conscript fathers of Lieberschweinsgarten 
forthwith picked a German quarrel with him (which is about 
equivalent to a Welsh jury finding a man guilty of forgery, 
because he can't drink nine quarts of ale at a sitting), and 
solemnly banished him the town. Young Fritz — who had a 
pretty fortune of his own in Marks-banco — went to Strasburg, 
where he plunged into the delirious dissipation of that 
Alsatian capital, to the extent of spending all his Marks-banco 
among the breweries and the broom-girls. Then he went to 
play the violin, for a livelihood, in a theatre at Brussels ; and 
then he went to the assistant architect of the cathedral of his 
native town — whose name I need not mention, your ears 
being polite. So Walter Biber keeps the " Konig von 
Cockaign "all to himself, and sits in his musty little counting- 
house, like a son of Arachne — a big, bloated, cruel, morose 



THE GREAT HOTEL QUESTION. 117 

spider — spinning his webs of rechnungs, or hotel bills, for un- 
offending travellers day by day. 

The house is one big, lumbering, furniture-crowded nest of 
low-ceilinged parlours and bed-rooms, like cells in an ante- 
diluvian beehive. The beds surpass in size and clumsiness 
the English four-posters, on which Mr. Albert Smith pours 
out so many vials of wrath. As to the furniture, it is so 
heavy, clumsy, close-packed, impossible to move, that you 
are compelled to thread a winding labyrinth between chairs, 
tables, sofas, and cabinets, before you can accomplish the 
journey to bed. When you do reach that great mausoleum 
of Morpheus, you are stifled beneath an immense feather-bed, 
in addition to the one you lie on ; when you lay your head on 
the pillow, surging billows sprayed with feathers rise on 
either side of you, and engulf you ; and there you lie, panting, 
seething, frittering into an oleaginous nonentitjr as Geoffrey 
Crayon's uncle — that bold dragoon — did in the inn at Antwerp. 
You don't sleep. I should like to see you try it. First, you 
are asphixiated ; then, you have incipient apoplexy. After- 
wards, you have the nightmare. The " Konigvon Cockaign," 
in his full suit of armour, comes and sits on your chest, and 
scorches you with his red nose. Then Frederick the Wicked 
brings the dome of the cathedral, and claps it on your head, 
searing your eyeballs meanwhile with red-hot knitting-needles; 
Walter Biber sitting at the foot of the bed, all the time, 
chanting the rechnung of the hideous morrow to you, to the 
tune of the Dead March in Saul. The rats, the ghosts in 
white, the vampire bats, the spiders in the bed-curtains, 
and the ten thousand unbidden, unseen guests in brown great 
coatsj who do not smell of attar of roses, but who feast upon 
your carcase, and suck your blood, need scarcely be mentioned ; 
they are part of the bill of fare of the " Konigvon Cockaign." 
Confound the King of Cockaigne ! 

The charges are abominable, the cooking intolerable, the 
waiters sleepy and clumsy. There is an odour of stale tobacco 
smoke in the very bread. The beer is sour and mawkish. 
There is nothing to read in the coffee-room except a Lieber- 
schweinsgartener Zeitung three weeks old, and printed on paper 
that we would not wrap a pound of mutton candles in at 
home. The wine is inferior vinegar, bottled to be a standing 






118 THE GREAT HOTEL QUESTION. 

libel on the Rhine and the Moselle. There is a hideous 
woman with a beard, perpetually peeling carrots under the 
gateway. She ought to be in one of Gerard Dow's pictures, 
where she would be at home; but, in the flesh she is unbear- 
able. There are two-score repetitions of the old women 
crouching under red umbrellas at the base of the cathedral- 
wall, with' monstrous cabbages and radishes like yams for 
sale. If you dispute Walter Biber's hotel charges, he 
threatens you with the Polizei-Bureau, and half hints that you 
are a political refugee recently escaped from Spandau. You 
have been told that in cases of extortion you can appeal to the 
burgomaster. The burgomaster is Walter Biber's uncle. 
Perhaps the senate will pick a German quarrel with you. 
You make haste to pay the accursed rechnung (after having 
changed a five-pound note at a Jew banker, who swindles 
you out of about eleven per cent, for variations of exchange, 
pestiferates you with garlic, and calls you " my lord"), and 
make haste to escape from Lieberschweinsgarten, with a firm 
resolve never to visit it again. 

Of the third class of German hotels I am not qualified to 
speak, inasmuch as I have never been in any of them. From 
Mr. Albert Smith's account of the " Drei Mohren " — the Three 
Moors — at Augsburg, it is an hostelry which, however defi- 
cient in comfort, must approach perfection in the cellar 
department. Only listen to the recital of only a few of the 
wines which are in bottle, of prime quality and in first- 
rate condition. At the "Drei Mohren" you can have 
Schloss Saalecker, Oberingelheimer Walpazheimer-Kirchwein, 
Drachenfelser Drachenblut, Liebfraumilch, Cantenac de la 
Domaine du Prieure, Grand Larose du Baron Sarget Bethman, 
Muscat de Rivesaltes, St. Peray mousseux, Solera generoso, 
Canariensekt von Teneriffe, Witte Constantia von Lowenhof, 
Roode Groote Constantia van Cloote (a terrible Turk of a 
wine, I should think, this), Erlauer-Magyar Korona-bor, 
Neczmely, Refosco d'Isola, Aleatico di Ponte a Marino, Est 
Est Est di Montefiascone (the well-known ecclesiastical neat 
wine), Falernum Calenum, Calabria di diamante, Lwadia von 
Heraclia bei Athen, Cypro-Zoopi, Tenedos Leucophrys, and 
Vinum sanctum Bethlehemitanum ! I long for an opportunity 
to put the promises of the " Three Moors " to the test. 



THE GREAT HOTEL QUESTION. 119 



CHAPTER III. 

ITALIAN AND AMERICAN HOTELS. 

The Yankees (by whom I mean the pure New Englanders 
alone) are reckoned to be the most inquisitive race of people 
upon the face of the habitable globe. They kill you with 
questions. All Europe has heard — through the sapient and 
incomparable Diedrich Knickerbocker, the Herodotus of the 
Manhattoes — of Anthony van Corlear the trumpeter, who was 
questioned out of his horse by a cunning man of Pyquag, and 
sent back to New Amsterdam on a vile calico mare. There is 
no escaping the interrogations of a Yankee; whether in 
railway-car, on steamers' hurricane-deck, or in hotel parlour ; 
and this the Honourable Amelia Murray (may she never be 
kidnapped and sold down South, there to experience the bless- 
ings of slavery!) knows full well. There is but one instance 
on record, I believe, of a Yankee being worsted, in the query 
line of conversation; and this was the questioning Yankee 
who persisted in asking the dyspeptic man with the wooden 
leg how he had lost his missing leg, and after much pressing 
was told, on a solemn promise that he would ask no more 
questions, and under a penalty of dollars uncountable, that it 
had been bit off; whereupon, in an agony of uncertainty as 
to who or what had bitten it off, and how — whether it had 
fallen a victim to the jaws of deadly alligator, or catawampous 
panther, or fiercely-riled rattlesnake; and, fearing to break 
his word, or lose his dollars, he was crestfallen and con- 
founded, and, ignominiously sloping, was seen no more in 
that territory. 

But I should like to know what interrogatorial exigence 
could equal the pertinacity with which — to the extent, even, 
of three mortal chapters of letter-press — I have been putting 
the Great Hotel Question, and, not content with seeking 
information, have volunteered replies myself? Can anyone 
wish to know anything more about hotels ? This is not a 
blue-book ; and yet I feel myself already arrived at question 
number 9004 ; and I have scarcely left the Royal Hotel, Dan, 
and feel it a duty to travel as far as the Grand Junction Hotel, 
Beersheba, before I have finished asking questions. 



120 THE GREAT HOTEL QUESTION. ■ 

How about Italian hotels ? The discursive mind at once 
travels to the Seven Taverns, the hostelry at Brundusium, to 
which Horace travelled;, and to that choice resort of the 
Roman fancy in Pompeii, where Burbo was licensed to sell 
neat Falernian; where the young patricians were drunk on 
the premises, and where there was doubtless commodious 
stabling for gilt- wheeled chariots, and the wild-beast studs of 
sporting swells of the equestrian family. But, putting a bar 
of twenty centuries, what have I to say of the Italian hotels 
of the present day ? 

There is the great Caravanserai of travelling milords : say 
in Rome, Milan, or Florence, the Casa Borbonica. This was, 
in old times, the palazzo of the princely Cinquantapercento 
family : the last prince of that illustrious house — which has 
given cardinals to the Church, generals to the army, gon- 
falonieri to the towns, and worthless drones to the social hive 
for ages — is now a snuffy old reprobate, burrowing in a mean 
entresol in a dark little street of a Parisian Boulevard. He 
has sold all his Titians and Guidos to the Jews. The brocan- 
teurs have all his statuary and carved furniture, down to the 
damascened suit of armour in which his great-grandfather 
went to the battle of Rustifustiacone, and ran away in ; and 
the inlaid dagger with which his grandmamma slew the 
monsignore who had written an epigram against her : but he 
has still his coat of arms, with its seventy-five quarterings ; 
and in the picture-gallery of his once palace, now the salle-a- 
manger, there is yet the picture of his ancestor Hercules, son 
of Latona, subduing the Nemsean lion (Menditore, fecit). The 
Casa Borbonica (the Comte de Chambord sent to engage 
apartments there once, but didn't come ; whence its Legitimist 
name) has been an hotel these thirty years. It has a fine 
frontage to the river Piccolitto, and is big enough for a 
barrack or a small-pox hospital. Indeed, the somewhat 
dilapidated condition of its exterior ornamentation suggests, 
in no remote degree, the idea of its being pitted with that 
latter ailment. It has acres, so to speak, of vast, lofty rooms ; 
it has a grand saloon, the ceiling painted in fresco with a copy 
of Guido's Aurora ; it has a marble paved vestibule, with a 
fountain in the middle ; it has a grand staircase of scagliola, 
on whose steps several members of the Cinquantapercento 



THE GREAT HOTEL QUESTION. 121 

family have been, in desirable old romantic picturesque keep- 
sake days, done to death by the rapiers and partizans of their 
Mends and relatives ; the ground-floor gives on to a terrace, 
and that again on to a garden in the real Italian style : foun- 
tains, straight clipped avenues, filagree gates, casts from the 
antique gods and goddesses, and sham ruins ; there are vases 
full of flowers; there are Renaissance doors; there is the 
suite of rooms in malachite and gold ; there is the suite in 
blue-fluted satin (the Countess de DemimondofF's rooms) ; and 
the suite in ivory and black velvet ; there are countless bed- 
rooms full of marble, fresco-painting, and fluted columns; 
there are, almost everywhere, the elements of grandeur, 
luxury, and artistic taste. 

Gaetano Montepieta is the landlord of the Casa Borbonica. 
He was a Colonel in the army of Italy, under Beauharnais 
originally (surely those Italian colonels are only approached, 
numerically, by the American militia-generals) ; then he was 
Lord Scamperland's courier ; then he kept the Hotel des 
Etrangers in Little Nick Street, Leicester Square, London; 
and, realising a handsome competency in that cosmopolitan 
but unsavoury locality, returned to his native land, and 
invested his savings in the hotel which you see. In the great 
traveller's book you are at liberty to register your opinions 
and impressions for and against the comfort, cheap7iess, and 
convenience of the Casa Borbonica. Be just, and write with 
a firm hand that in summer weather the rooms are delightful ; 
that — the smell of decayed melons and warmed up maccaroni 
apart — it is very pleasant to have the run of a vast, gaily- 
decorated palace, amid orange-flowers and bubbling fountains ; 
that the blue sky is glorious through the casements, and the 
shade of the lofty walls delightful in the noontide to smoke 
cigars and drink lemonade in ; that ice-eating in the garden 
by moonlight is delicious ; that almost every article is really 
exceedingly cheap (unless, indeed, you are known to be a 
milord, when you are swindled on the ground that you are 
accustomed to, and like it) ; that even if you are notoriously 
wealthy and liberal, the rent of the malachite and gold, or of 
the ivory and black velvet suite, lags far behind the jocundly 
extortionate price which you have to pay for a first-floor in 
the Rue de la Paix, or a garret in Pall Mall ; that the waiters 



122 THE GREAT HOTEL QUESTION, 

are civil, obliging, quick-witted, and grateful ; and that the 
cooking, though decidedly oily, and not over neat, is substan- 
tial and succulent. But here you must stop. Commendation 
can go no further. You have been just; now be candid. 
Put down in burning characters that Gaetano Montepieta is a 
humbug; a cringing, insolent (when he dares), hypocritical, 
unveracious son of a Lombardian keeper of hogs. I will not 
say that he is a Roman — no ; he is not quite so great a 
scoundrel as that ; but the Emperor of Austria has had very 
few more finished humbugs among his Italian subjects. I 
am aware of you, mio amico Gaetano. I have been up to 
your little game for a long time. I know how you pop down 
in my bill lire and soldi for sugar I have never eaten, and wax 
candles I have never burnt. I know how, when I breakfast 
out, you slily mulct me in two breakfasts instead of one, as a 
warning and a punishment. You are own brother, Gaetano, 
to the widow Fizzicatti, who keeps the furnished lodgings in 
the Strada Smifferata (she has cousins in Camden Town), who 
makes me sign a list of furniture, crockery, et cetera, supposed 
to be in her abominable chambers, when I take them by the 
month, and brings me in a bill, long, venomous, and tor- 
tuous as a serpent, when I leave, for jugs I have broken and 
never saw, and tablecloths I have inked and never heard of. 

Gaetano and his wax candles : to listen to the honest Mont 
Blanc chronicler, one would think the candle grievance was 
exclusively confined to England. Why, the whole Continent 
cries out against them. You pay but seventy-five cents 
a-piece for them, to be sure ; but you are made to burn or to 
pay for myriads of them. Bougie, bougie, bougie, — bougie 
here, bougie there, and bougie everywhere — take your old 
hotel bills out of your trunk and add up the amount of francs, 
lire, florins, or carlini, candles have cost you ; and you will 
find that you might have had an exhibition of fireworks all 
to yourself every autumn, and have been economical. I think 
continental hotel-keepers and waiters feel a savage pleasure in 
bringing you fresh wax-candles, as I am certain they do in j 
winter time, in cramming your cupboard with new supplies of 
logs and faggots. I have often, during a bougie nightmare, , 
fancied a congress of waiters in the corridor, dancing a wild; 
saraband, and singing an atrocious Carmagnole till the scene! 



THE GREAT HOTEL QUESTION. 123 

changed to a patent candle factory, and candles and waiters 
whirled off in a wild Sahara waltz into infinite space. 

Lift not your pen also from the travellers' -book (stern 
candour demands it) till you have recorded this, — that there 
never was an Italian hotel that was clean or sweet- smelling. 
That those at Venice in particular rejoice in an odour that 
makes you sick, giddy, and bilious ; a smell of which it can 
with little exaggeration be said, as of some London fogs, that 
you could cut it with a knife. Set down also, in a firm 
Roman hand, that the rooms are awfully damp, and in cold 
weather afflicted with distracting, gusty, piercing draughts ; 
and that, after every shower of rain, the grand frescoed 
saloons are pervaded by sundry unwelcome visitants from the 
gardens — not to say reptiles, of the most hideous coleopteric 
descriptions ; which crawl, and wriggle, and buzz, and fly, 
and leap, and shake their hundred legs over your clothes and 
: food till you are blind and mad. Tell the truth, and acknow- 
ledge that with all the malachite and gold, Aurora frescoes, 
scagliola staircases, and romantic Cinquantapercento reminis- 
i cences, the grand Italian hotel is but a seedy, poverty-stricken, 
dilapidated, tumble-down, vermin-haunted, quasi-rotten insti- 
tution after all. 

In Rome, there is a special hotel which appears to lie 
: fallow during fifty-one weeks in the year, and suddenly to 
start up into life, with a teeming crop of guests, in Holy 
Week. Then, and for the succeeding days of the carnival, 
the Romans going stark staring mad, invite all the sight- 
seers of the world who have money and leisure to cross the 
Alps to play with them. They make a Guy of the poor old 
I Pope ; they spoil their clothes with wax-candle droppings in 
the chapels ; they crush each other's toes, ribs, fans, and hats, 
1 in their struggles to see the losel pilgrims' feet washed ; they 
! scream, and jostle and bribe chamberlains, and run broken- 
; kneed horses in the Corso, and dress themselves up in 
: masquerade costumes, and pelt each other with chalken and 
: plaster of Paris abominations, and tell Christendom that they 
iare celebrating a great religious festival. Now it is that the 
special hotel becomes manifest. Nobody heard of the Hotel 
I del Matto Forestiere, or of the Madonna di Scarlatina, since 
last carnival ; but now, sallow commissioners rampage about 



12'4 THE GREAT HOTEL QUESTION. 

Home, lauding the unrivalled accommodations of these hotels. 
Whole English families, who have been unable to obtain 
rooms in the Piazza di Spagna or Del Popoio are hustled 
almost involuntarily into atrocious Bug -parks in remote 
quarters of the city. Principi Inglesi find themselves dwelling 
among the Trasteverini ; and travelling archdeacons are pent 
up in outhouses among mouldy old convents, and churches, 
and seminaries, where the Scarlet Lady rides rampant. To 
be sure, to obtain a bed at all in Holy Week is very nearly as 
dear and difficult as to secure a cardinal's hat. The prices 
quoted are fabulous. Romantic stories are told of the wonder- 
ful substitutes for bedsteads which travellers have been 
obliged to put up with ; of how Sir Newport Pagnell, Bart., 
and family occupied a detached building formerly the residence 
of some four-legged, curly-tailed animals of the porcine per- 
suasion, which had been removed to better lodgings ; how 
Captain and Mrs. Gunwale, R.N., had paid five dollars a day 
for a cockloft ; how one of the 370 Prince Galitzins in the 
peerage of Russia was sojourning in a wood-cellar ; and how ' 
young Rougebox of the Florentine Legation slept two nights 
in a well, and one on a staircase. The Beppos, Francescos, 
Luigis, and Tommasos, who conduct these special houses of 
entertainment clear profits, while the excitement lasts, of about 
600 per cent. ; but their prosperity is as transitory as that of 
Cowes landladies in regatta time, or of lodging-house keepers 
in an assize town when there is a good murder case to be 
tried. For the rest of the year, nobody hears anything more 
of the Matto Forestiere or the Scarlatina ; and the Beppos and 
Francescos may, for aught I know, earn a livelihood in sitting 
as models for the painters, grinding hurdy-gurdies, or goading 
buffaloes. 

Country Italian hotels are not much removed, I fancy, from 
the likeness of that renowned inn at Terracina, where the 
Englishman met the fair Venetian, and had afterwards the 
adventure with the brigand. There are five metropoli : Rome, 
Florence, Venice, Naples, and Milan. I will throw in Genoa, 
to make up the half-dozen ; so say (and I give a margin of 
two digits) twelve good hotels in all. The provincial ones 
are simply execrable, for the simple reason that they are not 
patronised by continuous relays of strangers. Who stops, 



THE GREAT HOTEL QUESTION. 125 

longer than he can help, in a small Italian town? "We 
scamper from capital to capital, charging through galleries 
and museums in a Cossack fashion, seeing a thousand pictures 
and statues, remembering, perhaps, a score, and understand- 
ing, very often, not one. Some day, very likely, the small 
towns will be opened up by railways, and we shall have good 
hotels in them. 

I have two additional remarks to make on Italian hotels, 
and I have clone with the boot-shaped peninsula. Imprimis, — 
about Naples. In that delightful city the hotel-dweller may 
enjoy a lively but expensive gratification over and above all the 
pleasures of the sea, the sky, and the table-dlwte. The gratifi- 
cation (which is not charged for in the bill) consists in being 
robbed- — I don't say by the waiter — I don't say by anybody in 
particular — but I think by every man, woman, and child, who 
can gain access to your apartment, your pockets, your trunks, or 
your generous feeling. From the coachman who drives you to 
your hotel, to the waiter who bows you from it, be assured 
every mother's son has something about him which belongs 
not to him, but to you. It matters little what they steal, a 
pocket-handkerchief or a purse of gold. It matters less who 
is the thief, the heir apparent, or one of the lowest lazzaroni 
of the Quai Santa Lucia — robbers there must and robbed you 
must be. I don't know what the Neapolitans will do between 
their hang-dog government and the threatened extinction of 
Vesuvius. Honest men won't come under the sway of the 
glorious, generous king, and sight-seers won't go to see 
Naples, if there be no burning mountain. Fancy 350,000 
thieves with nothing to steal ! A pitiable case, indeed. They 
will die of grief; and I did once hear of a waiter at a 
Neapolitan hotel who was found by an Englishman sitting on 
the staircase, and weeping bitterly ; and, being asked the 
cause of his sorrow, answered, amid heartrending sobs, — the 
signor is unjust, the signor is ungenerous, the signor performs 
not his duty towards men. He locks up all his drawers, and 
leaves not a rag about, and one cannot steal the value of a 
carlino from him ! 

What do I know about Spanish hotels ? — nothing. I 
might, indeed, conjure up an unsubstantial word-picture 
about omelets, oil, garlic, puchero, funcions, muleteers, gregos, 



126 THE GREAT HOTEL QUESTION. 

slouched-hats, and swarthy dons laying down their cigarillas to 
eat their soup, and resuming them while waiting for their olla- 
podrida. I might fill in a back-ground with Sefiora Perea 
Nena dancing, while Sefior Alfonzo Ruiz plays lithely on the 
■■castanets; or with Don Quixote charging the windmill, or 
Dorothea taking her eternal footbath in the distance. But 
this would be but a blurred, unfaithful photography, and 
worthless. Let us be truthful or we are nothing. The 
Spanish campaign is yet to come. Nor can I tell you what 
the hotels in the Tyrol are like (though I have been told 
those at Ischl are charming) ; nor can I perorate on the 
great, bare, ruinous Khans of Asia Minor. When my uncle — 
Colonel Cutcherry — comes home from Madras, I will collate his 
experience as to the capacities of the Overland Route hotels at 
Cairo and Alexandria ; and you must wait till I have entered 
the College of the Propaganda, and till I have been sent to 
China as a missionary, till I am enabled to describe, in the 
manner of Father Hue, the hotels of the middle kingdom. I 
must no longer tarry in Europe (though due in an English 
hotel soon), for my boat is on the shore, and my bark is on 
the sea ; yet, before I go, here's a double health to a conti- 
nental hotel I have ungenerously passed over. I allude to 
the Grand Labonreur, and that, for once, in my fantastic 
roving commission, is its veritable name. I have nothing but 
what is favourable to say of that sumptuous traveller's joy. 
Good dinners, clean beds, excellent services, moderate prices, 
— all are to be found at the Great Labourer, of Antwerp, and 
he is worthy of his hire. 

I have been purposely silent on the 'subject of the hotels of 
Constantinople, because they are in a transition state, like 
Turkey itself, at present. It is to be hoped that the mighty 
influx of military visitors, and the T. G.'s who will be sure to 
keep on flocking thereto for some years to come, will work 
wonders of improvement in the hotels of Byzantium. The 
Old Pera Hotel, kept generally by an equivocal Levantine, or 
an unmistakeable Maltese, was decidedly of the bad-dear, 
dirty, and uncomfortable. 

My boat being on the shore, it is necessary that you should 
«nter it with me, in order to reach my bark on the sea ; for 



THE GREAT HOTEL QUESTION. 127 

we have a journey of 3500 miles to make before we can reach 
an hotel, without a description of which these papers would 
be maimed and imperfect. I will trouble you also to disburse 
a matter of thirty guineas (exclusive of wines and liquors) for 
a state-room on board the " Great Bear of Michigan," mail 
steamer ; furthermore, to hurry down to Liverpool by express, 
get on board the tender, tell your friends to expect you back 
in about six months, and prepare yourself for a ten days' 
sojourn on the briny ocean ; for you, and I, and her Majesty's 
mails, are all bound, in the spirit, to New York. 

The steamer in which you make the easy, rapid passage, 
is, in truth, and in almost every respect, a great floating 
hotel in itself. The steam-boat company having had the 
ingenuity to divine that a sea voyage, even of ten days' dura- 
tion, is despairingly tedious, have come to the conclusion that 
the best methods of wiling away the time lie in eating, drink- 
ing, and smoking ; and have most wisely afforded the amplest 
accommodation for the indulgence of these three pastimes. 
The passengers add a little gambling by way of rider to the 
staple amusements. With an excellent library, a spacious 
promenade, a luxurious table, a snug bed-chamber, and con- 
genial society of both sexes, he must be a misanthrope or a 
hypochondriac, indeed, who could find a trip in an Atlantic- 
steamer tedious. It has not unfrequently occurred to me 
that, if I had money, I might do much more foolish things 
than pass a year sailing backwards and forwards between 
New York and Liverpool ; and I can imagine a traveller, 
inimical to change and fond of sitting down when he finds 
himself comfortable, as reluctant to quit the steamer at the 
end of the voyage, as the life-long prisoner was to leave the 
Bastile. Talk of a ship being a prison with the chance of 
being drowned. I should like Dr. Johnson to have sat at the 
sumptuous table of the " Great Bear of Michigan" on a 
champagne day. He would have taken wine with Captain 
Wobble, I warrant. 

There has been a rough day or two, and you have been 
sea-sick in a gentlemanly way, and you have touched at 
Halifax and Boston, and you enter, at last, the incomparable 
Bay of New York. You see the pilot-boats, the groves of 
masts, the sunny islands ; you are boarded by the news-boys ; 



128 THE GEEAT HOTEL QUESTION. 

you hear all the shouting, smell all the cigar-smoke, pass the 
Custom House, and land. A ragged Irishman immediately 
reminds you that Donnybrook Fair is immortal; fights a 
pitched battle with seven other Irishmen raggeder than him- 
self, dances a jig on your luggage, and hustles you into a 
villainous cab, for which, at your journey's end, he makes you 
pay very nearly as much as suits his own sweet will, abusing 
you terrifically if you dispute his fare. Only take one cab in 
New York, and you will be perfectly convinced of the existence 
of thorns in a rosebush. He rattles you through broad 
streets : you catch glimpses of immense buildings of white 
marble and coloured bricks, of a blue cloudless sky, of slim 
young ladies dressed in bright colours, of news-boys smoking 
cigars, of vast storehouses, of innumerable repetitions of the 
ragged Irishman, of bearded men, of tarry sailors, of ugly 
churches, of flaunting flags, of tearing fire-engines with red- 
shirted firemen. You don't know whether you are in Paris, 
or in Dublin, or in Liverpool, or in Wapping, or in America; 
and you are set down at last at the great New York Hotel — 
the St. Boblink House. 

The " St. Boblink House " is a mighty edifice of pure white 
marble. St. Boblink is much too noble a saint to be canonised 
in compo. The windows sparkle like gems in a queen's 
diadem, and seem as numerous as the facets in a crystal. 
Wide y awning* is the doorway; countless are the columns; 
lofty and aerial the balconies ; vividly verdant the verandahs ; 
and high up above the topmost balustrade floats, self-assert- 
ingly in the air, the great banner of the Stars and Stripes. 
This is an hotel with a vengeance, but run not away with the 
impression that it is unique — a solitary monster, like the 
" Sphinx," the " Grand Hotel du Louvre," or the " Great 
Western Hotel," Paddington. It has brothers, and cousins, 
and children as capacious, if not more so, than itself, on either 
side, and up and down, as far as the eye can reach, in the 
great transatlantic Boulevard — the Straightway. The " St. 
Boblink House " is but one among an army of colossal hotels. 
The "Parvarer House," the "St. Hominy House," the 
" Golden Gate House," the " Amalgamated Squash Hotel," 
and other high-sounding hostelries. The " St. Boblink." is a 
vast eating and drinking factory ; an Eastern caravanserai 



THE GREAT HOTEL QUESTION. 129 

opened up by American enterprise ; an emperor's palace let 
out in room-lots at three dollars a-day; a Vatican for voyagers. 

People say that there are above two thousand rooms in that 
same Vatican. I shouldn't like to bet ; but to guess, from 
the hordes of travellers that the " St. Boblink " gives shelter 
to, it would really seem as though his Holiness the Pope had 
the smaller house of the two. The ear of man has not heard 
how many the " St. Boblink " would accommodate at a pinch; 
and no one is in a position to dispute the boast of Washington 
Mush, its landlord (now travelling with his family in Europe, 
his suite consisting of a secretary, a courier, a tutor, a 
governess, and two ladies' maids), that he could take the 
whole of Congress in to board ; provide beds, in addition, for 
the British House of Lords, if they felt inclined to come over 
and see the workings of the American constitution ; and find, 
without much trouble, shake-downs into the bargain for the 
House of Commons. 

You may have rooms, and suites of rooms, at the " St. 
Boblink," at a sliding scale of prices. If you are inclined to 
do the Sardanapalus, you can revel in splendour, and ruin 
yourself if you like ; but if you are but a simple, sensible, 
single traveller, who has travelled, perhaps, 1200 miles with 
no more luggage than a valise, or a shiny carpet-bag, you 
may board and lodge, and enjoy your thousandth share of all 
the luxuries in this hotel-palace for the moderate sum of three 
dollars, or twelve shillings and sixpence per diem. There are 
even cheaper, and not much less splendid hotels ; but the 
" St. Boblink" is a first chop — an A-l house. 

For your three dollars a-day you have the run of all the 
public apartments, a noble billiard-room, where you may win 
or lose dollar-bills of or to excitable southerners and senators 
in want of excitement, to your heart's content; reading-rooms, 
where the 10,000 newspapers of the Union — all printed on 
the largest possible paper in the smallest possible type — are 
spread on the green-baize tables ; smoking-rooms, where you 
may taste the flavour of real Havannahs, or luxuriate in the 
mastication of the fragrant pigtail ; writing-rooms, audience- 
rooms ; cloak-rooms ; lavatories, conversation-parlours, and 
lounging-balconies. I don't know whether they have fitted 
up a whittling-room at the " St. Boblink" yet; but I dare 



130 THE GREAT HOTEL QUESTION. 

say that convenience will be added to the establishment on the 
return of Washington Mush, Esq., from Europe. At the 
same time, perhaps, it would be as well to erect an apartment 
devoted exclusively to the national pastime of expectoration. 
At present, for want of a special location, the whole palace is 
one huge spittoon, which is inconvenient to foreigners. 

The bar-room of the " St. Boblink " may be imitated, but 
it can never be equalled in Europe. No efforts of plastic art, 
of upholstering ingenuity, of architectural cunning, of licensed - 
victualling cunning, could produce such a result as is here 
apparent. The green velvet spring couches, with carved oak 
arm-rests, that artfully invite you to lounge ; the marble 
mantel-pieces and stove-tops that seem to say, seductively, 
" Come, raise your heels above the level of your heads, and 
show the European stranger a chevaux de /rise row of black 
pants;" the rocking-chairs; the dainty marble and bronze 
tables (transatlantic remi nis cences of Parisian cafes ) ; the 
arabesqued gas-burners; the cut-glass looking-glasses, gilt 
frames, and Venetian blinds; the splendiferous commercial 
advertisements that so worthily usurp the place of stupid high 
art pictures and engravings ; for who would not rather see 
" Fits, fits, fits ! " in chroruo-lithography, or "Dr. Turnipseed's 
Medicated Mangel wurzel," or "The Patent Heracleidan 
Detective Padlock," sumptuously framed and glazed, than Sir 
Edwin Landseer's "Deerstalk in g," or the Queen after 
Winterhalter ? But I do the bar of the "St. Boblink" 
injustice. There are some engravings. The massive head of 
Daniel Webster frowns upon the sherry-cobler drinkers ; 
proudly (in a print) in the muddy Mississippi, defiant of 
snags and sawyers, steams along the " Peleg Potter" steamer 
— huge, hurricane-decked, many-portholed, high-pressured, 
and hideous ; her engines working in sight, as if her boilers 
were impatient to burst, and had come up from the engine- 
room to see how many passengers there were, before bursting. 
Then there is a grand view of the palace itself — the " St. 
Boblink" — as large as life (at least on the scale of half an 
inch to a foot), lithographed by Messrs. Saxony and Mayor. 
The bar-room has almost made me forget the bar itself; 
though surely one visit to it is sufficient to stamp it in your 
remembrance for ever. There, on that great marble field of 



THE GREAT HOTEL QUESTION. 131 

Bacchus, are sold the most delicious thirst-quenchers in the 
two hemispheres. It is not necessary that I should enumerate 
them. The names, at least, of Egg-noggs, Juleps, Brandy- 
smashes, Timber-doodles, and Stone-fences, are known in 
Europe ; and there are already several buffets in Paris where 
you can be supplied with the cool and cunning drink known 
— wherefore I am ignorant — as a " Fiscal Agent." The bar- 
keeper is a scholar and a gentleman, as well as an accom- 
plished artist, captain of a fire company, and, I believe, a 
man of considerable property, and has unapproachable skill 
in compounding and arranging these beverages, and making 
them not only exquisite to the taste but delightful to the view. 
His drinks are pictures. See that tall tumbler, gracefully 
proportioned, elegantly chased. See through its pellucid 
walls the artfully-chiselled blocks of purest ice, the frozen 
powder at the top, the crisp icicles, spear, arrow, halberd- 
headed, that cling about the rim like bronze scrolls on a buhl 
cabinet. See the blessed liquor within — ruddy, golden or 
orange tawny — dancing in the sunlight, sparkling in the 
glassy depths, purling through fissures, rippling through the 
interstices of the ice, and seeking the lowest depths, the 
remotest caverns, where the seaweed (represented by a sxDrig 
of mint) is, and the mermaids dwell. See the summit, 
crowned by a blushing green-crested strawberry ! Do you 
not feel inclined to sing with the poet : 

Hide, tide those hills of snow 

Which thy frozen bosom bears, 
On whose tops the pinks that grow 

Are as those that April wears. 

You feel inclined at least tc hide the pink strawberry by 
swallowing it, and to melt the hills of snow by sucking them 
up through a delicate straw together with the dancing golden 
liquid, and all the by-delights that lie hidden in that glorious 
drink. Then you may retire into a corner, and, kicking up 
your heels even unto an altitude of six feet from the ground, 
rest them there on some friendly ledge, and enjoy your mild 
Havannah, or your keif, or your quid, or your passion for 
castle-building. There are degrees, my son, in human enjoy- 
ment. A cool tankard and a long pipe in an arbour looking 
upon a smooth bowling-green Has, ere now, been the dearest 



132 THE GREAT HOTEL QUESTION. 

solace of scholars and divines. Others can find no enjoyment 
more gratifying than a bright fire, close-drawn curtains, a 
silver teapot, and an uncut number of the Quarterly. There 
are men whom you could not tempt with gold or jewels or 
tickets for the Lord Mayor's banquet, to say there was a 
greater pleasure in life than playing with their children. 
Sugar -and- water and a toothpick will content some ; a cigar 
and cold toddy on the tiles others; but, for my part, I do 
not know a pleasanter animal enjoyment, of the tranquil, 
meditative kind, than an American drink and a cigar, and 
my keif afterwards. Yet even these rejouissances are tran- 
sitory: a melancholy bubbling in the straw tells of the 
last drop of the ''Fiscal Agent." Then comes the empty 
glass, and payment, and remorse. 

The bar-keeper and his assistants possess the agility of 
acrobats and the prestidigitative skill of magicians. They are 
all bottle-conjurors. They toss the drinks about ; they throw 
brimful glasses over their heads ; they shake the saccharine, 
glacial, and alcoholic ingredients in long tin tubes ; they 
scourge eggs and cream into froth; they send bumpers 
shooting from one end of the bar to the other without 
spilling a drop ; they give change, talk politics, tell quaint 
anecdotes, swear strange oaths, smoke, chew, and expectorate 
with astonishing celerity and dexterity. I should like to be 
a bar-keeper, if I were clever enough. 

It is in the " St. Boblink House " that you can comprehend, 
in its majestic amplitude, the great American institution of 
liquoring. Here, where the desopilated loafer and the shrewd 
merchant, sallow from Wall Street bargains ; the over-dressed, 
over-smoked, over-saturated-with-tobacco-juice aristocrat from 
Fifth Avenue; the cotton-sampling clerk; the dry-goods 
selling dissenter, not being an advocate of Maine, its liquor- 
law, or a sitter at the feet of John B. Gough ; the Congress 
colonel ; the courteous steamboat captain ; the scorched 
southerner ; the apathetic Dutchman, from his Hudson farm ; 
the turn-down-collared lecturer ; the black-satin-waistcoated 
editor ; the raw-boned Kentuckian ; the blue-eyed German ; 
the boastful Irishman, mingle and drink, and drink again. The 
thing is gravely done — sternly, almost solemnly. The drink 
is a duty, as well as a mere relaxation and refreshment. It is 



THE GEEAT HOTEL QUESTION. 133 

a part of the mission of the sovereign people ; and the list of 
American drinks should be hung up in the national museum ; 
along with the national tar-bucket, the national feather-bed, 
the national revolver and bowie-knife, the national declara- 
tion of independence, and the national and almighty dollar. 

I have no hesitation in saying that the table-d'hote at the 
" St. Boblink House" is the very best array of eatables in the 
whole world. In cookery, the subtlety of the sauces, and re- 
finement of the flavouring, may be surpassed by some few 
European diplomatic chefs ; but the quantity and quality of 
the viands do, to adopt a native locution, " whip all creation." 
Roast and boiled, fried and stewed, fish, soups, including the 
delicious terrapin, and the famous Gumbo ;- oysters (such 
oysters!), game, poultry, rice birds from South Carolina infi- 
nitely preferable to ortolans, pastry, sweets, jellies, blanc- 
manges and ices. For an Apician feast, commend me to the 
" St. Boblink." Sing, muse, too, of its breakfasts, with their 
plethora of strange but delicious fishes, and their hundred 
varieties of bread, hot and stale. 

This is, then, the " St. Boblink Hotel," with its clerks' 
office like a banker's counting-house ; with its courteous, 
accomplished clerks in rings and chains ; with its bridal 
chambers fitted up in white satin, ivory and gold, for new 
married couples on their wedding tour; with its hundred 
mechanical appliances for bell-ringing, message-calling and 
trouble-saving of every description ; with its electric telegraph 
laid on like gas or water, its countless waiters, its really 
moderate charges, and admirable management and discipline. 
Can anything be wanting to make it perfect ? Little, perhaps, 
save the conversion of the bedrooms into which single travel- 
lers are put, from comfortless, scanty, draughty dogholes, 
into decently furnished and moderately comfortable chambers, 
and save the abolition or banishment of that great nuisance, 
and curse, and scandal, the expectoration of tobacco juice. 

Come away from the " St. Boblink House," traveller, for we 
are wanted in Europe again. JBy the time we return to the 
States, perhaps the giant palace will have been burnt down 
and built up again, bigger and handsomer than ever. 



134 THE GBEAT HOTEL QUESTION. 



CHAPTER IV. 

ENGLISH HOTELS. 

I have already striven to set down the chief characteristics, 
outward and inward, of foreign hotels. When we are told that 
we have so much to learn from them, and that no more praise- 
worthy models could be offered for our guidance, it is meet at 
least that we should know what they are really like ; where lie 
their exemplary excellences, where their most notable defects. 
There are more Poll Parrots in the world than are to be found 
in brass wire- work cages. We are but too glad to save our- 
selves the trouble of thinking for ourselves, by appropriating 
and repeating the thoughts and dicta of other people. No 
doubt there were many things much better managed in France 
than in England when the Sentimental Traveller gave to the 
world his travelling experiences ; yet I am of opinion that there 
are some few things we can manage in our own way, and in 
our own land, with no indifferent success, and in whose 
management we need not cede to our continental neighbours. 

I will first put up at " Jalabeet's" first-class inn. 

" Jalabert's" is designed for the accommodation of The 
Superior Classes. What free-born Briton's frame is free from 
a tingle of respect, admiration, pride, when he hears the term 
Superior Classes ? That a duke, a lord, a baronet, a bishop 
— a superior class man, in a word — should be content to leave 
the Assyrian magnificence of his half-dozen town and country 
palaces, even for a season, and put up at a mere hotel, is in 
itself an act of such condescension and abnegation of self, 
that the least we can do is to have a " Jalabert's" to receive 
him, and that it should be well and universally understood 
that Jalabert's is devoted to the reception of the superior 
classes, and of those only — not of the profanum valgus. 

Now " Jalabert's," the great London hotel for the superior 
classes, is situated in Purple Street, Flaxen Square ; which, as 
all men know, is within 250 miles of Old Bond Street. It 
was originally an old, cooped-up, inconvenient, George the 
Second house, which was the bachelor residence of the well- 
known Claribel Claribel, Esquire, a great friend of Sir 
Charles Hanbury Williams, a member of parliament for my 






THE GREAT HOTEL QUESTION. 135 

Lord Mintoncomyn's borough, of Heeltap, and Assistant Com- 
missioner of Lunacy for the liberty of St. Kits — which last 
snug little sinecure brought him in just 1900Z. a-year. On the 
lamented demise of Mr. Claribel, which occurred one day, in 
consequence of a surfeit of mushroom patties and Maraschino, 
as he was stepping into his chair at White's, after winning a 
few hundreds at E. 0. of Mr. Selwyn; his mansion in Purple 
Street became the property, by testamentary bequest, of the 
Sieur Dominique Jalabert, formerly of the Canton des Grisons, 
his attached hairdresser and valet-de-chambre. Dominique 
turned the place into an hotel, and prospered exceedingly. 
Although a foreigner, he manifested a decided predilection for 
guests of the English nation ; and, at the epoch of the Great 
French Revolution and emigration, discouraged the patronage 
of the superior classes of the continent. He made an excep- 
tion, indeed, in favour of the Prince Trumebert de Perigord 
Dindon, who had adroitly escaped from France before the 
confiscation, had sold all his estates for cash, and had brought 
away all the family jewels sewn up in his wife's brocades. Of 
the friendship and countenance of this noble emigre Jalabert 
constantly boasted. He would have been glad for him to stay 
years in his hotel, because the most elevated members of the 
British aristocracy condescended to play hazard with the 
prince ; nevertheless Jalabert seized the boxes of the Cardinal 
Duke de Rohan Chambertin for the amount of his bill, and 
locked up poor M. le Chevalier de Rastificolis in the Mar- 
shalsea for a similar reason. 

At the peace of 1814, however, a sudden change came over 
the spirit of Dominique Jalabert's dream. He suddenly con- 
ceived a profound and enthusiastic affection for foreigners — 
superior foreigners. He was proud to accommodate allied 
sovereigns. He doated on ambassadors. A Hetman of the 
Don Cossacks was his delight. Not a strong politician 
ordinarily, he believed fanatically in the Holy Alliance ; and 
his fanaticism culminated into idolatry when a Holy Ally 
travelled with a large suite, and sent a courier on before him 
to order a suite of apartments. 

It was at this time that Dominique bought the freehold of 
Lord Pyepoodle's house, next door to the right ; subsequently 
adding to it, to meet his increasing hotel requirements, old 



136 THE GREAT HOTEL QUESTION. 

Mr. Pillardollar the banker's house, next door to the left ; 
and lastly, the roomy mansion of Lord Chief Justice Tripple- 
tree (afterwards raised to the peerage under the title of Baron 
Hempshire) round the corner. The original Jalabert died 
immensely rich, about five and twenty years ago. Latterly he 
wore a wig and a shirt-frill, and was quite a respectable 
man; indeed it is said that he never recovered the shock 
he felt at the death of the Emperor Alexander. His son, 
Castlereagh Pitt Jalabert, Esq., lives at a park in Somersetshire, 
rides to hounds, and has served the office of High Sheriff. I 
should not at all wonder if the next heir were created a baronet, 
and the family name Anglicised into Jollybird. 

Messrs. Salt and Savoury are the present proprietors of 
" Jalabert' s." S. and S. are also landlords of the " F. M. Prince 
Albert," close to the North Polar Railway Station ; the 
"Grand Pagoda Hotel" (formerly the " Brown George") at 
Brighton; the " Mulligatawny House," at Cheltenham; the 
"Benbow and Badminton," at Greenwich; and the "Kehama 
Hotel," at Windermere. Salt and Savoury belong to the 
great consular hotel-keeping families, who have their cara- 
vanserais all over England, and whose names there should be 
a Sir Bernard Burke to register. " Jalabert' s," their great 
London hotel, has grown from Claribel Claribel's two-storied 
hencoop-looking bachelor residence, into an immense establish- 
ment. It is six houses rolled into one. The streets on which 
it looks are narrow and gloomily genteel ; its brick walls are 
dingy and smoke-blackened; its windows dark and diminu- 
tive : but its vastness is untold. When I lose myself acci- 
dentally in the labyrinthine regions of Flaxen Square, or take 
a solitary walk there, to air myself in the regions of aris- 
tocracy, I look with awe and trembling on " Jalabert' s." It 
has so many doors. It seems so proudly contemptuous of the 
struggles and exertions of new hotels that strive to push 
themselves into notice and patronage, by show architecture 
and newspaper puffs. " Jalabert' s," on a tarnished brass 
plate ; that is all you see, — the place might be a doctor's or 
a solicitor's ; but, ah ! what patrician grandeur there is in 
that reserved waiter on the doorstep, the portly man with the 
large whiskers who calmly picks his teeth (he has turtle every 
day, I am sure) and half closes one eye to look at the street- 



THE GREAT HOTEL QUESTION. 137 

scape as though it were a glass of generous port. 1 wonder, 
when I look at him, whether he powders his hair to wait on an 
ambassador, and whether he brings in dinner in a court suit, 
and with a sword by his side. 

" Jalabert's" is dear, enormously dear. What else can be 
expected ? A traveller sojourning at such an hotel, acquires 
a sort of collateral interest in the peerage, the diplomatic 
service, the maintenance of our institutions, and the divine 
right of kings. He who stays at " Jalabert's" is tacitly 
recognised by the establishment as a Nob, and the dignity is 
charged for in the bill. They would perform ko-tou there to 
the Emperor of China ; they would burn incense to the Grand 
Llama of Thibet ; they would light the pipe of the Great 
Sachem of the Blackfoot Indians ; they would even sacrifice a 
junior partner to Juggernauth ; but they would charge for it 
in the bill. There is nothing unattainable at " Jalabert's." 
There are bills in the books, I dare say, running " His High- 
ness Hokeypokey wankeyfum : Jan. 13, — cold boiled middle- 
aged gentleman, 1 8 guineas ; baked young woman, 201. Os. 6d. ; 
baby en papilloltes, 51. 5s.;" or "His Holiness the Pope 
[he was at " Jalabert's" incog, as the Bishop designate of 
Hylogiopotamus in partibus infidelium~\ Baldaquin, SI. ; paid 
for triple crown (packing, wadding, and box), 971. 3s.; em- 
bracing toe (four times), 50L" Such things must be paid for. 
Honours, glories, adulations, incense, ko-tous, toe- kissing are 
expensive articles. You must have a "Jalabert's" for such 
luxuries, even as you have strawberry-leaves, gold sticks, 
stoles, and dog-latin rolls of King Richard the Second for 
peers, a bald-headed man in spectacles at 800/. a-year to hold 
up the tail of the Right Hon. the Speaker of the House of 
Commons, and eight cream-coloured horses to draw the 
Queen's coach. 

A housemaid who had once taken service at " Jalabert's" 
told me that the internal arrangements of "Jalabert's" are 
splendid beyond compare. There are the largest looking- 
glasses in the sitting-rooms that ever were seen ; only the 
apartments are so small and dark, that those vast mirrors are 
lost in obscurity, and waste their sweetness on the dingy air. 
The passages are all thickly carpeted. The service of plate is 
of enormous value. You dine there off silver and Sevres, and 



138 THE GEE AT HOTEL QUESTION. 

Dutch linen and damask. You have an epergne, if you like, 
to yourself. Every refinement of luxury, every item to the 
most infinitesimal of comfort, you may and do have. The- 
head-waiter — I beg pardon — the groom of the chambers — is- 
a funded gentleman, and has a villa, with a conservatory, at 
Mitcham. Wealth, pride, dignity, dulness, noiselessness, and 
secrecy, distinguish " Jalabert's." 

" Jalabert's" is not for you or me, my brother. It is as 
far beyond our reach as the entree at St. James's, or as a seat 
in the royal pew at church. I question even if a man having 
20,000Z. a-year, no+ being a Nob, could have the moral 
courage to drive to <c Jalabert's." His voice would falter as 
he ordered apartments ; he would call the waiter Sir, and the 
groom of the chambers would very probably say to him, " My 
good man, it really appears to me that you must have mad& 
some mistake." Then he would drive away, crestfallen and 
mortified, to Euston Square or Paddington. Why the very 
boots at " Jalabert's" must be a Nob. The boots ! he must be 
called the Hoby, or the Patent Leathers, surely. He never 
whistles or hisses while he polishes. He wears a white neck- 
cloth, and reads the " St. James's Chronicle," perhaps. The 
only way for the plebeian to be enabled to enjoy " Jalabert's" 
costly and exclusive hospitality seems to me to be this. 
Emigrate to America. Make a fortune. Renounce your 
allegiance, and become an American citizen. Get made, or 
make yourself, a General of militia, a member of Congress, 
or a secretary of legation. Then come boldly across the 
Atlantic in the first-class cabin; arrive at " Jalabert's" with 
a profusion of portmanteaux, and despatch-boxes, and you 
will be received with open arms and ledgers. You may loaf 
in its lordly sitting-rooms, you may whittle its carved fauteuils, 
you may soil its Turkey carpets, you may call the groom of 
the chambers Hoss, and the landlord Boss; and the house- 
maids Helps ; you may smoke in the corridors, and order gin- 
slings in the coffee-room. But do not mistake me ; do not 
imagine that it is in the power of dollars, almighty as that 
power is, to enable you to do this. You go to Court, your 
name is in the " Morning Post;" you dine at the Legations; 
you are a member of the Travellers' Club ; lords call upon 
you ; viscountesses invite you to their parties, although you 



THE GEE AT HOTEL QUESTION. 139^ 

are an American, a democrat, and your ancestor may have 
been an Irish hodman, a German tailor, or an English convict : 
you are a Nob. This is the secret. But let Raffaelle Sanzio, 
Esq., painter, or William Shakspeare, player, and member of 
the Dramatic Authors' Society ; or Tycho Brahe, astronomer 
(assuming them to be in life among us) — let them, granting 
them amplest means for paying their bills, seek accommoda- 
tion at " Jalabert's." I warrant the groom of the chambers 
would look askant at them, and that the waiters would turn 
up their noses at having to wait on "profeshnal pipple." 

Let " Jalabert's " nourish. I have no call to wince at its 
high charges — my withers are unwrung : its upper chambers 
even are not for those of my degree. As for its darkness and 
narrowness and gloominess, the Nobs doubtless prefer those 
elements to democratic light and height and space. Bless me ! 
don't people live in the stable-yard of St. James's Palace? 
Don't the pokey little houses in the purlieus of Spring Gar- 
dens fetch fabulous rents ? The Nobs like holes and corners. 
They make Her Majesty ride in a coach above a hundred 
years old, and in danger of tumbling to pieces with rottenness. 
Abolish that coach, and build her a neat, airy, springy 
vehicle in Long Acre at your peril. The British constitution 
I is at stake. There would be a revolution to-morrow. 

The second most notable London hotel is the family or 
private hotel in Jermyn Street, St. James's Street, Piccadilly. 
y Smawkington's " hotel is a very nice hotel of these two 
classes mixed. " Smawkington's" is not exactly in Jermyn 
Street, but in Little Great Boot-tree Street close by. It is the 
snuggest, warmest, quietest, yet cheerfullest little hotel you 
can imagine. When I say little, I mean compact, tight, cozy. 
There is not an inch of boarding to be seen about the house. 
All is carpeted, oil-clothed, matted. I wonder they don't 
carpet the doorstep. The house is as clean as a new pin. 
The house-maids and chambermaids are all rosy and all good- 
looking. The housekeeper is a beauty. The cook belongs to 
a glee-club, and cooks you blithe, wholesome, cheerful, honest- 
hearted dinners, that make you eat a great deal, but never 
give you an indigestion. I should like very much indeed to 
marry the young lady who sits book-keeping in the com- 
fortable bar; not because she is Smawkington's only daughter, 



140 THE GREAT HOTEL QUESTION. 

and has a pretty penny to her fortune — I repudiate such 
mercenary motives with disdain — but for the sake of her 
"bright eyes and her rosy lips and her silvery laugh. I don't 
think Smawkington would give her to me, though ; inasmuch 
as he declares her to be the apple of his eye. Smawkington 
is bald, corpulent, sleek, and black-broadclothed. His wife 
is pious, bony, genteel, interested in missionary enterprises, 
and contemns the duties of domesticity. Mr. S. is not unlike 
a duke, or the chairman of a select vestry, or an undertaker in 
flourishing circumstances. He wears a signet-ring, and keeps 
a mail-phaeton ; under which there runs a plum-pudding dog 
of the Danish breed, quite in the Hyde Park style. Of the 
wines at " Smawkington' s " — the famous ports, the peculiar 
clarets, and the noted sherries — I have heard that they will 
make a cat speak ; but I know, for certain, that they will 
make a man merry. Look you here, Mr. Albert Smith. 
When the ruddy curtains are drawn, and the crystal sparkles 
on the sideboard, and the ruby and golden contents of the 
decanters gleam on the table; when the fat little port- wine 
glasses are filled, and the filberts are in the vine-leaf dessert 
plate, and the almonds and raisins are at hand, and the 
candles are lighted and the fire trimmed — then is the time to 
confess that all is not barren that cometh out of England, and 
that your nut and your wine, partaken of with all the 
accessories of English comfort in an English family-hotel, cau 
compete with, if they do not surpass, the splendour of the 
great French salle-a-manger, or the tinselled ornateness of the 
cabinet particulier, with its long-necked array of sour beverages. 
I like to see my wine. I would rather have an aldermanic 
decanter of handsomely-cut glass, and the red-sea of jollity 
gleaming within it, than a lanky flask of green glass, be- 
smeared with hideously-coloured sealing-wax, and tilted in a 
basket like a go-cart. Faultless family-dinners take place at 
" Smawkington's." You may smell the good things as you 
pass; there is no ostentation — no show — no noisy gongs 
clanging; but all is substantial, respectable, comfortable, 
cozy, English. 

The most constant guests at " Smawkington's " appear to 
me to be bishops, and rich old ladies. Other members of the 
dignified clergy, and other old ladies, occasionally frequent 



THE GREAT HOTEL QUESTION. 141 

it ; but the real, complete bishop, gaiters, apron, shovel-hat, 
and all, seems the pontifex maximus of " Smawkington's." 
You may see his cob at the hotel-door every morning, in 
waiting for his grave ride about Whitehall and Downing 
Street. The rich old lady, too, arrives from Devon or Somer- 
set in a travelling-carriage. She has ladies' -maids, com- 
panions, lap-dogs, confidential male servants and orphan 
proteges. Frequently she has a bevy of long-ringleted, sea- 
green-skirted daughters ; sometimes a niece. She has rackety 
rapid young country squires or desperate guardsmen also 
appertaining unto her as nephews. But, for them, " Smaw- 
kington's " is a vast deal too slow. They hang out, as they 
call it, at vivacious hostelries in the noisy part of Piccadilly, 
or in Covent Garden Piazza, or Charing Cross. They drive 
up to " Smawkington's " in tearing cabs, or ride up on ram- 
pagious horses. They have grave grooms and impudent little 
tigers. They come to see the old lady ; they flirt with the 
sea-green-skirted daughters, and scandalise the reputable 
waiter by demanding brandy and soda-water at unreasonable 
hours in the morning. 

" Smawkington's " cannot — candour obliges me to acknow- 
ledge it — be called a cheap hotel. It is dear, but not extor- 
tionate. Nor is it unapproachable to the democracy, like 
" Jalabert's." The modest democrat can stop there, and need 
not ruin himself ; and I can honestly state that I can find in 
London many other hotels as comfortable and well conducted. 

The chief objections to, and grounds for, denunciation of 
English hotels seem to be these : First, as to the performance 
of that seemingly simple operation, washing your hands. You 
ring for the waiter, who says, " Hands, sir ? — yes, sir ! " and 
goes away. Then you ring again. Then at last you are 
introduced to a chambermaid, who, after a tedious journey 
up-stairs and down-stairs, conducts you to a bed-room, where 
she draws the bed-curtains and pulls down the blinds — not 
because such is wanted, but from mere mechanical habit. 
Then you are left to your own devices, with some hard water 
that would curdle the soap, if it would dissolve ; but you 
might as well wash with a piece of chalk as with the 
singularly-hard white cake in the soap-dish. There is one 
towel, damp and hard, like a piece of embossed paste-board; 



142 THE GREAT HOTEL QUESTION. 

and with, these aids you may make what toilet you can, and 
then come out to find the attendant waiting for her fee at 
the door. 

The next nuisance is having to pay what you please to 
servants, without a fixed charge in the bill. Even commer- 
cial men have generally a tariff of their own (it is threepence 
a meal), but they will tell you themselves that they are 
puzzled at times to know what to do. If such be the case, 
what must it be with mere tourists and visitors, when the 
donation received by one waiter with smiles and thanks, is 
sulkily carried away by another without a word, or with a 
muttered question of " Whether it includes the Boots ?" 

A real grievance is wax candles ; but a grievance, as we 
have seen, not confined to English hotels. Mr. Albert Smith 
is peculiarly sore upon the point, having been made first to 
burn them, and then to pay heavily for them at all sorts of 
places. When he is at home he does not burn wax candles, 
and sensibly makes bold to say that the majority of his readers 
do not : they are content with Price or Palmer, or a moderator 
lamp, or, better still, with gas. He recommends travellers 
not to have private rooms, unless they see that gas has been 
introduced into them. There is something so enormously 
comic and absurd in a stranger at an hotel sitting down alone 
in a cheerless room, with two grim wax candles burning 
before him in dreary solemnity, that he must be a dull fellow 
indeed who would not laugh outright at this melancholy little 
bit of state ; if it were not for the annoyance we all feel at 
liaving useless expense thrust upon us. 

Whenever Mr. Albert Smith sees pictures of " Pulling up 
to Unskid," or "Down the Road," or "The Salisbury 
Rumbler meeting the Exeter Delay upon Easterly Common," 
he is sure that, in the room decorated with such pictures, 
wax candles are made to burn as the Pope only knows how 
much an inch ; for these extortions — it is the only proper 
word — chiefly occur in the hotels that were great in those 
days of misery, the fine old coaching times. Of the coaching 
times and coaching inn our pamphleteer has a fierce horror. 
Years ago he avowed that the writer who tried to invest an 
inn with an idea of picturesque comfort (I have sinned in that 
way myself more than once, woe is me !), made a great mis- 



THE GREAT HOTEL QUESTION. 143 

•take : and so, lie says, have all those who, in the sturdiest 
traditional spirit, still believe or make believe they believe so. 
Light and warmth after a cold night's journey make an inn 
-comfortable ; so would be a brick-kiln, or a glass house, or a 
blacksmith's forge, under similar circumstances. But the 
feeling at arriving at an inn in the day-time, when you know 
you have to stay there, is to him irresistibly depressing. 
Have you never had the blues, O Reader, in some gloomy 
hotel at Rotterdam on- a wet day, with a prospect of a fog in 
the afternoon and a frost to-morrow ? The utter isolation in 
the midst of bustle is bad enough ; but everything, according 
to the lively explorer of the Bernese Oberland, makes it worse 
in an English hotel. The chilling sideboard, with its formal 
array of glasses ; the thorough Swiss of the household, whose 
services can only be procured by paying for them ; the empty 
tea-caddy and backgammon board ; the utter absence of any- 
thing to beguile even two minutes, beyond a local directory, a 
provincial journal of last Saturday, or "Paterson's Roads; " the 
staring, unfeeling pattern of the paper, and, in the majority 
of country places, the dreariness of the look-out ; the clogged 
inkstand and stumped pens ; the inability to protract a meal 
to six hours to get rid of the day ; and above all, the antici- 
pations of a strange bed, with curtains you cannot manage, 
and pillows you are not accustomed to, and sheets of unusual 
fabric — all these discomforts keep him from ever falling into 
that rampant state of happiness at an inn which popular 
delusion would assign to a sojourn therein. This is a truth- 
ful picture — a daguerreotype of inn-dulness, but is it not 
also true of the very liveliest — so long as they are strange all 
over Europe, all over the world? A man may travel from 
Dan to Beersheba and find all barren. Wet weather, cold, 
solitude in a crowd, ill-health, bad spirits, will make Naples 
or Genoa as horribly dull as Shepton Mallet or Market 
Rasen. 

Neither can our friend sleep comfortably in that grand old 
temple of suffocation and nightmare, the fourpost-bedstead ; 
although this is one of the fine and ancient institutions which 
it is the glory of England to cling to. Originally constructed 
in the dark ages, when doors and windows would not close, 
and chimneys were blast furnaces, and space was no object, it 



144 THE GREAT HOTEL QUESTION. 

lias come down to us in all its original, imposing, hearselike, 
presence — shorn only of its surmounting plumes of dusty- 
feathers, which may yet be seen in some old places, gloomily 
brushing the ceiling. Why it so happens that, in the con- 
ventional hotel, the smaller is the room the larger is the four- 
poster, it is impossible to explain. Within the heavy, 
expensive, elaborate mass of serge, chintz, feathers, mahogany, 
horsehair, sacking, holland, ticking, quilting, winch-screws, 
brass rings, and castors and watchpockets, the hapless tra- 
veller rolls about in vastness, and swelters, and gasps, and 
breathes the same uncirculating air over and over again; and 
before he ventures into it, it is even at times asked "if he 
will have a pan of coals?" Without the bed, his toilet 
operations are necessarily confined to cabin-like space. There 
is no table to put anything on, nor is there any room for one. 
Sitting in such a cribbed chamber is out of the question, and 
so he has no choice between the coffee-room, and the gaunt, 
stark, expensive private apartment, where the old waiter 
makes him an assenting party to all the old tomfoolery of burn- 
ing two old wax candles, in two old plated heavy candelabra 
rather than candlesticks, after which it is possible the old 
chambermaid sends him to his old bed with an old mutton 
dip without snuffers. 

In the country-town hotel, the coffee-room was a ghastly 
place. There was no gas; but some mould candles were 
burning about with cocked-hat wicks, and their light was all 
absorbed by the dingy paper. The only pictures were of the 
old coaching school, with that dull, half-animal clod, the 
Jehu (as writers of the Pierce Egan school used to call him), 
tooling the prads along a road at a rate they never achieved. 
There was a dusty old stuffed pheasant in a glass case over 
the door ; a looking-glass over the mantel-piece, divided into 
sections, that put each side of your head on a different level if 
you got between them, making your face look as if it were 
going up stairs ; a number of dark old tables, indented with 
knocks of presidents' hammers and freemasons' glasses ; and 
a couple of long, old fashioned bell-pulls of scarlet stuff edged 
with black, which came down bodily when you pulled them. 
On a thin, bygone sideboard were some old, battered, plated 
cruet-stands and egg-cups — always with the copper coming 



THE GREAT HOTEL QUESTION. 145 

through ; and an ancient toast-rack of the same fabric — one of 
those you can only see at sales. A nipped old lady presided 
in the bar ; the waiters had the air of briefless old barristers, 
who had tried to better themselves by taking to the hotel 
business ; the boots was permanently bent with carrying 
portmanteaus up and down stairs; and % the chambermaid had 
attended on Queen Charlotte when she changed horses there. 
They had all lived at this inn without changing one of its 
arrangements, until they had allowed the world to ride past 
in an express train, and finally away from them. 

We are comforted, after all, with an ominous rumour that, 
even just at present, a large hotel is contemplated in London. 
If well conducted, it must (so we are told) return a fortune to 
the shareholders. The attention of readers and of the public 
is directed to a summing up of one or two changes which the 
travelling world will appreciate. First and again, a fixed 
and moderate charge for attendants. Secondly, bedrooms on 
the continental plan, in which the inmates can sit if they 
please, without being driven to the melancholy extortion of the 
grim " private room." Thirdly, something beyond ''chop, 
sir, steak, boiled fowl," for dinner. Fourthly, the entire 
abolition of wax candles, coffee equipage, and the whole 
service of battered regular old-established English-hotel plated 
dishes with the copper showing through. Fifthly, civil, quick, 
appreciative waiters; not anomalous people between mutes 
and box-keepers. Sixthly, an office for general information or 
complaint, with responsible persons always therein. Seventhly, 
and lastly, the recognition of the presence of ladies in the 
coffee-room, as in the foreign salle-a-manger. 

Many, indeed all, of these suggestions are pregnant with 
good sense ; and I am sure that their adoption would lead to 
increased comfort, convenience, and cheapness in our English 
hotels. But I do not agree with some censors in utterly 
denouncing them. We have much to reform, much to im- 
prove, much to remodel ; but entire destruction of our hotel 
edifice I would respectfully deprecate. I am of opinion that, 
in a vast number of instances, we might go much further 
abroad and fare immeasurably worse. Bad attendance, inci- 
vility, discomfort, useless parade, and extortion, have' their 
home elsewhere than in England.- I have been in as many 



146 THE GREAT HOTEL QUESTION. 

foreign hotels as most men, and — woe is me ! — I know it. 
The best plan to adopt, and one that would produce a new and 
bright era in the management of hotels, ^vould be to take the best 
part of each system — French, German, Swiss, and American — 
and graft them on to our own. To hotels conducted by com- 
panies I do, and must always dissent. I do not in the least 
object to joint- stock companies building, fui-nishing, and 
founding large hotels : for, if properly and comprehensively 
commenced, hotels are gigantic enterprises, and it is only by 
association of capital that they can be established. But their 
after-management must be confided to some entrepreneur, 
whose fortune, credit, knowledge, and reputation are at stake 
in the well-working thereof; and not to a hired servant, whose 
salary is punctually paid whether the hotel be well or ill- 
conducted. The " Pavilion Hotel" at Folkestone was begun 
by a company; the "Great Western Hotel" belongs to a 
company; the " Granton Hotel" near Edinburgh was built by 
a company ; but they are all underlet ; and, if we except 
scarcely- avoidable and exceptional shortcomings, better con- 
ducted hostelries do not exist in Great Britain. I am no tory, 
Heaven knows, but I am conservative enough strenuously to 
desire the retention of the Landlord as an institution. 



THE PEE SENT MOMENT. 



It is a wise dispensation of Providence (and which, among 
its dispensations, lacks wisdom ?) that a man is ordinarily so 
occupied with his own immediate affairs, that he has no 
leisure to consider those of his neighbours; to bring the 
application closer still, that he is generally so engrossed with 
the thought, or pastime, or avocation of the moment, that the 
other transactions in which he may be implicated, though, 
perhaps, greater and graver, and portending sorrow and tribu- 
lation rather than joy and content, are mercifully permitted to 
be for a season out of his mind ; and, though they cannot be 
wholly forgotten, are unconsidered for the time. Thus I have 
heard of a merchant knowing well of the dread fiat in bank- 
ruptcy at that very moment being sued out against him, yet 
who could dance at a children's party, and play at games and 
forfeits, and be the gayest and the loudest laugher there : all 
the while his goods absuming away from him like grease in 
fire. Thus, too, he against whose name in the calendar Justice 
Hempridge has written the lamentable words " sus. per coll? 1 
will sleep soundly on the very morning of his execution; 
though his lullaby be the breathing of the turnkeys watching 
him lest he should do himself a mischief. It was the mer- 
chant's business just then to dance, and it is that of poor Jack 
o' Newgate to sleep ; and Mercy allows the present necessity 
to overshadow and pre-occupatively overcome the contingent 
emergency. Lord Clive mending the pen a minute before he 
destroyed himself with the penknife, majr very probably for 
the time have been absorbed in the nice task of splitting the 
quill into a hair or broad nib. It may be instanced, as proof 
how common things and thoughts oft neutralize the horror of 
a supreme event, that the author of this paper, being once 
within the minutest hairsbreadth of a sudden and cruel death, 
— lost for a moment the prescience of destruction in the com- 

l 2 



148 THE PRESENT MOMENT. 

mon -place thought that the over-coat he had on, which was not 
his own, but had been borrowed from a Mend, would be torn to 
ribbons. The beginning of fear and wisdom has fitted us with 
just that measure of capacity to render its entire concentration 
on the matter in hand, not only necessary, but imperative. 
The burden is so equally fitted to our backs, that we feel not 
the equipoising panniers at our sides. Not only for the day, 
but for the moment, is the evil thereof sufficient ; the focus of 
this our telescope of life requires such accuracy of fixature that 
the present unity is the limit of our vision ; he that shifts it 
hath a squinting soul. 

Yonder white-headed, blue-ribboned old Statesman ; will 
he not stand on his poor old gouty legs for hours in the 
weary night, when he should be comfortably abed, stand in 
the unwholesome atmosphere of a scientifically ventilated hall, 
the butt of coughs and " oh ! ohs ! " and jeers, and oft-times 
groans and hootings, the mouth-piece of a faction, the target 
of the rhetorical shafts of orators, raw from the "Union 
Debating Society," or livid from the perusal of blue-books? 
Will he not remain, anxiously debating how he shall exculpate 
himself from the fierce accusations of his honourable friend 
(whom he hates as his enemy) on the opposite bench, triumph- 
antly chuckling when he has posed an antagonist, and sitting 
down with the cheers of a crowded house resounding in his 
gladdened ears. And will not the deliberation and the defence, 
the refutation and the triumph, cause that old nobleman mo- 
mentarily to forget his gout and his post obits ; the lawyers in 
Lincoln' s-inn ; his son in the Guards, who must sell out if his 
debts are not paid next month ; his daughter, who would per- 
sist in marrying that chaplain, who has treated her so indiffer- 
ently since ; his wife, whom he detests, and who has been 
suing him ferociously lately about her "paraphernalia," chiefly 
consisting in a gold snuff-box, presented to her grandfather by 
George the Second, for sitting on Admiral Byng's court- 
martial ? Yes. The bailiffs may be in possession of Castle 
Lackrent ; the family diamonds may be in the custody of Mr. 
Triball; the twelve tribes of Israel may be keeping up a 
ceaseless clamour about interests unpaid, and mortgages to be 
foreclosed ; but the noble lord is engrossed pro tern, in the 
vital question as to whether the barrack-master at Ballygarret 



THE PEESENT MOMENT. 149 

was illegally dismissed or not. The opposition maintains that 
he was ; Lord Viscount Lackrent maintains that he was not — 
and victoriously maintaining it, forgets disease, debt, and 
difficulty, and is, for the time, triumphant over all. 

Again : here in the Court of Quiddities you shall see a 
graVe old judge, majestic in his wig and his fur. The sands 
of life have filtered sagely and decorously and profitably 
through the glass; but he is seventy years old now; and 
there are few, very few grains left to run. He is rich, and 
honoured, and wise and famous ; but his hand shakes, and his 
eyes are dim, and his voice is feeble ; and his memory begins 
to play him strange tricks. He can remember, to a dactyl, 
the Latin verses he made at school ; but he cannot exactly call 
to mind who was plaintiff, and who defendant, and what the 
action was all about that he tried yesterday. Yet you shall 
see him in the Court of Quiddities, patiently listening to the 
hair-splitting arguments of counsel; you shall hear him 
copiously pouring forth stores of erudition upon the right of 
patent in the ribs of an iimbrella ; accurately weighing and 
commenting upon every tittle of evidence for and against the 
vexed question of a bad sixpence ; nicely balancing the pro 
and con as to whether Mossop kicked Barry, or Barry kicked 
Mossop ; concentrating all the wisdom and learning, the expe- 
rience and observation of seventy years into a bad joke to 
make the jury titter, or a clap-trap sentiment to elicit a peal 
of applause (immediately afterwards, and rigorously repressed 
by the officers of the court, of course) from the gallery. Who 
should not be jubilant at the existence of that mercy of limita- 
tion which places the horizon at the end of the Statesman's 
nose, and an adamantean wall round the retina of the judge's 
eye ; which can make them both forget, in the absorption of 
the Irish barrack-master's dismissal, the patent umbrella, the 
bad sixpence, Barry's kick, the bad joke, and the clap-trap 
sentiment, how old and feeble they both are ; how swiftly and 
steadily the sands are running through the glass ; in how 
short a space of time they must be brought to 'death, " and to 
the house appointed to all living." 

In Hoc Momento pulsat JEternitas — (In this moment throbs 
Eternity.) But what a world of unceasing misery and lamen- 
tation, of impenetrable gloom and hopeless despair, this world 



150 THE PRESENT MOMENT. 

■would "be if the business, the happiness, the hope or fear of 
the Moment were not permitted to avert our eyes from the 
momentarily progressing dial and its mortuary inscription. If 
all our yesterdays were but to be considered as candles that 

have 

' ' lighted fools 
The way to dusty death," 

Each blessed morrow would be but as one guiding us still 
further graveward ; the years would be but as milestones on 
the high road to the House of Death. Such milestones we 
know them to be ; but thank God there are pleasant prospects 
on the way, and green glades and sunny spots. We may stop 
and rest — we may beguile the journey with innocent mirth ; 
there are way-side inns for refreshment, and pleasant cuts and 
bridle-paths : we must make the journey, and come to our 
bourne at last ; but which is better ? — to march along cheer- 
fully, with a brave heart, and a stout walking-stick, singing a 
merry song at times ; going a little out of our way down a 
green lane to visit a mossy ruin or a snug cottage ; tarrying, if 
needs be, to help the ox out of the pit, and the lame dog over 
the stile ; to carry the milkmaid's pails — yea, and to keep 
company with her through the journey, for better for worse, if 
she be as good as comely ; to pull the wounded man out of 
the ditch, and bind up his wounds, and carry him to the next 
inn and leave two pence for him there ; to sit, now and again, 
on a green knoll to take a sketch of the glorious landscape j 
to halt, when hungry and weary, by a bubbling brook, to bathe 
the swollen feet, and kindle the crackling branches beneath the 
iron pot : yea, and to see that the stew be well concocted, and 
that there be good fellows to eat it, and that our brother in - 
rags be not forgotten in respect of the bones and fragments, — 
I say, which is better, this manner of journeying, or that 
adopted by brother Dolorosus, the brother with the sour face, 
and the hair shirt, and the girdle with spikes in it, who toils 
along barefoot, looking neither to the right nor to the left, 
choosing the hardest part of the road, where the shards and 
shingles are, and seeing nothing but misery and grief- in every 
possible and impossible direction ? Brother Dolorosus, you 
may brag lugubriously that you read " In hoc momento" on 



THE PRESENT MOMENT. 151 

the dial oftener than we do, and have the inscription in your 
eye and mind unceasingly ; but in your constant remembrance 
is there not some leaven of the vanity of the Pharisee of old ? 
and have not you, and have not I, and has not every one, 
business to do here, here, here — the business for which we all 
came into the world, — the business of transmitting it to the 
unborn, better, happier and wiser than it was ? 

If we were to pull down every booth in Vanity Fair ; if we 
were to shut up all the theatres, and hoist a black flag on the 
Crystal Palace ; if we were to dress the Life Guards out with 
crape-scarfs and staves like mutes ; if we were to set the editors 
of " Punch " in the stocks, and make laughter felony without 
benefit of clergy ; if we were to induce Mr. Shillibeer to "under- 
take " the office of prime minister ; if we were to abolish all 
music save that of the clanking of chains, the shrieking of 
owls, and the tolling of bells ; if there were a skeleton at every 
banquet, and an earth-worm in every bouquet ; if the ladies 
patronesses of Almack's wore shrouds over their muslins, as" 
the Jews do over their garments on the White Fast ; if the 
Lord Mayor mingled myrrh and vinegar in the loving cup at 
every Guildhall banquet, and an undertaker's man sat in his 
gold coach beside him, instead of the man (who is that man ?) 
in the fur cap, like the slave in the chariot of the Roman con- 
queror ; if Mr. Harker the toast-master, instead of entreating 
us to charge our glasses, were to confine himself to repeating 
the formula of the Eastern Herald : " Saladin the magnificent, 
Saladin the invincible must die ! " if we fed like Apollodorus 
on poisons, and drank only out of skulls, and delighted, like 
the late Lord Portsmouth, in " black jobs ; " if we all turned 
Trappists, and went about digging our own graves, and gravely 
whispering to each other, " Brother, we must die;" if the 
sentry at the palace -gates were instructed to call out, "Memento 
mori ! " every quarter of an hour; if the infant's cradle were 
made coffin-shape ; if the only study of our lives were to be 
that of the inscription on the dial-plate ; we might indeed be 
giving but a due consideration to the transitory nature of 
existence. But we come into existence for other ends, and our 
minds are therefore not formed, being healthy, to do these 
dismal things. It is in their nature, within due bounds, to 



152 THE PRESENT MOMENT. 

take their colour from the present moment, as the chameleon 
takes his from the nearest object. 

The matter of the moment will pre-occupy the sick man, 
groaning in the pangs of an incurable disease : though he 
knows his malady to be far beyond the reach of human skill ; 
yet an hour's cessation from pain, a bright day, a new doctor, 
the visit of a friend, will light up his face, and ring joy-bells 
in his heart. Have you never known him talk gaily of all he 
means to do when he gets well : of the friends he will visit, 
the schemes he will mature, the half-finished tasks he will 
complete ? Have you never heard the paralytic octogenarian 
feebly cackle of the new wing he means to build to his country 
house next year, when he has the use of his lungs again. He 
knows, they know, we all know, we must die. 

The lad of fifteen knows it as well, sometimes, as the patri- 
arch of ninety. "We all know that there must come a time 
when the movements of armies and the fall of kingdoms, the 
marriages of princes and the wars of giants, will be of no 
account ; when it shall be all one who reigns, who governs ; 
when those who love us, and tend us, and minister to us, will 
with difficulty be brought to abide with us alone ten minutes. 
But as soon as reason comes, comes also the consciousness of 
the imminence of death, and comes, thank God ! that glorious 
privilege of pre -occupation. We are dust and ashes, we 
know ; the flowers must fade, the plants and insects expire, 
the sun himself must die, before we can put on immortality ; 
but it is no Epicurean philosophy, no callous indifference, that 
teaches us, in reason and kindness, to enjoy life. It is a better 
teacher far than these. An infinitely higher wisdom than the 
wisdom of the Pharisee and Brother Dolorosus. 



A PEEP AT DUBLIN, 

ALL ALONG THE QUAY. 



To an Englishman whose chief knowledge of Ireland has 
been confined to what he has been able to glean from books 
and newspapers, and what he has gathered from the testi- 
mony of travellers, and from the conversation of Irishmen 
themselves, the first sight of the city of Dublin cannot fail 
to awaken in him an emotion of agreeable disappoint- 
ment. From all he has read and all he has heard of the 
misery and destitution of Ireland ; of her squalid poverty and 
utter prostration, physical and moral ; of the decay of her 
commerce, the stagnation of her inland trade, the grovelling 
poverty of her people, the neglect of her aristocracy, and the 
mismanagement of her rulers ; of the lamentable and pitiable 
state indeed to which she has been reduced by much mis- 
government and more national indolence — from what, in fine, 
he has seen and may inductively argue from the raggedness 
and wretchedness of the teeming Irish colonies' in London, 
and Liverpool, and Glasgow, he may expect, on landing on 
Dublin Quay, to find himself in a metropolis of hovels occupied 
chiefly by beggars and slaves, trampled upon by a few foreign 
tyrants, and priest-ridden by a rampant clergy. He may 
expect to see such nobles as are not absentees in second-hand 
attire ; the ruined gentry growing and selling potatoes for a 
subsistence ; he might look in every street for a repetition of 
Church Lane, St. Giles's, or Fontenoy Street, Liverpool, with 
tattered mendicants in every street, a pig in every parlour, and 
a whiskey shop at every corner. 

He lands. A magnificent city, numbering more than 
250,000 inhabitants, stretches along the two banks of a 
bright and unsullied river, in the midst of some of the most 
beautiful scenery in the world. Two magnificent lines of 



154 A PEEP AT DUBLIN. 

quays, broken by bridges (of which there are seven within the 
municipal boundary), and which equal in architectural ele- 
gance, though of course not in size, anything we can show on 
the River Thames ; streets of palaces ; a bank which is 
amongst the finest architectural monuments in Great Britain ; 
a splendid palace of justice (the Four Courts) ; a sumptuous 
Custom-House ; a noble university ; two venerable cathedrals 
for the Protestant form of worship and one for Catholic rites, 
together with a crowd of churches and chapels for every 
species of religious denomination. Were I to state that he 
may walk miles without being solicited for alms ; that he may 
peep into scores of parlours without catching the remotest 
glimpse of a pig wrestling for potato-parings with ragged 
children ; that he may sojourn in Dublin for days without 
seeing a drunken man ; that no blackguard boys pursue him 
with ribaldry, or fling mud at him, or tilt tip-cats in his eyes ; 
no gents puff cigar-smoke in his face ; no man curses him for 
a Saxon, or insults him for a heretic ; that the people are 
civil and obliging ; that there are shops which would put the 
glories of Ludgate Hill and Regent Street to shame ; hotels 
that for magnitude and splendour vie with the Adelphi at 
Liverpool and the Bedford at Brighton ; and when I state 
that, to crown all this, there has been built in Merrion Square, 
on the lawn of what was once the Duke of Leinster's palace, a 
Palace of Art and Industry, * elegant and tasteful in construc- 
tion, vast in extent, and magnificent in contents, due solely to 
the genius and patriotism of Irishmen, and to which more 
than 10,000 persons resort daily ; — were I to declare so much, 
I should be enumerating what may or may not happen to a 
stranger in Dublin ; and I should bring forward sufficient 
evidence, I fancy, to support me in the assertion that an 
Englishman, well up on the Irish Question, and the Irish 
Grievance, and the Irish Ulcer, will have some cause to open 
his eyes on his first visit to Eblana ; by which classical name 
I beg to state, for the information of my Saxon readers, 
Dublin was known to the geographer Ptolemy in the year of 
Orace 140. 

So many things that he expected to see the traveller does 

* This paper was first published in August, 1853, when the great Dublin 
Industrial Exhibition was open. 



A PEEP AT DUBLIN. 155 

not see, that he is fairly puzzled and amazed. The pigs and 
the drivers whooping after them ; the excited Hibernians 
brandishing shillelaghs and whiskey bottles, and entreating 
passers-by to tread on the tails of their coats — where are 
they ? Are the colonists in England more Irish than Ireland ? 
I came to behold looped and windowed raggedness, and, 
behold ! I find luxury and splendour. I came to see, in the 
words of the poet (a little altered) — 



Repealers spouting, 



And Lady Morgan making tay ; 
A ruined city and a bankrupt nation, 
An abject peasantry on a barren sod; 
Fighting like devils for conciliation, 
Hating each other for the love of God." 

In lieu of all this I come upon Mr. Dargan and Sir John 
Benson's glories ; the palatial drapery establishment of Messrs. 
McSwiney and Delany ; a theatre nearly as large as that of 
Covent Garden ; a mechanics' institute like a West End club ; 
railway stations handsomer and more commodious than the 
majority of English termini ; second-class carriages glistening 
with French polish and plate-glass, and redolent of morocco 
leather ; barracks much finer than Buckingham Palace ; a bay 
vieing with the Bay of Naples, and a park (the Phoenix) that 
may compete with that of Windsor. 

There, gentlemen and brigadiers of Ireland ! have I put 
enough couleur de rose on my palette ? Is the picture suffi- 
ciently gaily tinted for you ? Have I omitted one spray of 
the feathers in your cap ? I shall certainly expect after this 
to have a serenade of the brass band under my windows ; to 
have something handsome in the way of " rint " transmitted 
to me weekly. 

The more so, because I honestly aver that all I have stated 
of the splendour of the first aspect of Dublin is strictly un- 
exaggerated and correct. The first ! alas, the first ! C'est le 
premier pas, they say, qui coute ; but c'est le second pas qui 
achete : the first step costs, but the second buys — experience, 
disillusion. 

Philosopher, fresh from admiring the river front of Somerset 
House, cross by the bridge and gaze at Somerset's sorry brick 



156 A PEEP AT DUBLIN. 

sides. Tell me what the back windows of stately New 
Oxford Street look upon — whether upon more stateliness or 
upon Church Lane. Tear up the granite of Regent Street 
and look into the sewers. Cut open the five guinea Pantheon 
doll that squeaks papa and mamma, and take out the bran, 
and sawdust, and old rags. Go from the Venus de Medicis, 
to the dissecting room of Bartholomew's. Remove my lady's 
false hair and paint ; take out her false teeth ; tear out her 
false eyes, and put Mortality to bed. I knew a man once who 
had a vague chemical notion in his head that whatever in 
Nature was not oxygen, or hydrogen, or nitrogen, was carbon ; 
and who, whenever he had received an injury or a slight from 
any rich or powerful man, was wont to comfort himself by 
pointing to the coal-scuttle and saying, " Why, sir, after all, 
he's no more than that." 

Mind, I don't say that all this is the case with Dublin — that 
there must needs be dirt and wretchedness behind the granite 
splendour of the Post- Office, the Bank of Ireland, and Nelson's 
Column, or that King William's bronze doll in Dame Street is 
stuffed with sawdust and old rags. All this remains for after 
showing ; but I have seen only the splendour of Dublin as 
yet, and if you please I would rather not search for the rags 
and dirt and sawdust to-day. For the sky is blue, and the 
sun shines brightly ; so let us take a walk along what Dublin 
has good reasons to be proud of, the length of her quays. 

The Dublin quays are nearly three miles long. The pretty 
little river Liffey, during its whole course throughout the city, 
is not hidden, like the Thames at London, by houses and 
wharfs. No hideous seven-storied warehouses, no rubbish- 
crowded wharfs, no Phlegethonian fleets of frowning coal- 
barges, no factories with tasteless chimneys twisting out black 
smoke, no piles of rotting timbers, or dismantled half broken- 
up ships, or unpicturesque stone-yards, or uncouth ship- 
building sheds, or tumble-down crazy houses, or slimy stairs, 
line the banks of Dublin river, or obstruct the spectator's 
view. The stream is visible throughout; and you may travel 
on either bank by a broad well-paved road, running imme- 
diately between the houses and the river. In this and in 
numerous other instances there is a striking and agreeable 
resemblance between the quays of Dublin and the quays of 



A PEEP AT DUBLIN. 157 

Paris. The long unbroken lines of parapets and balustrades, 
and the shining river rippling and glistening at their feet. 
The numerous watchmakers, nick-nack toy and curiosity or 
Iric-d-brac shops, with the good-humoured throng of well- 
dressed loungers — (it is astonishing what a number of persons 
in Dublin, male as well as female, seem to have nothing to do) 
— peering at watches, toys, and jewellery, turning over shells 
and bog-wood bracelets, and thrusting their fingers into 
parrots' and macaws' beaks. The numerous shops for the 
sale of fishing-tackle, devotional books, and queer little pic- 
tures of the Virgin and saints, rosaries, scapularies, agnus 
Deis, and religious medals and ornaments. The short but 
handsome and often recurring bridges, the bent-double old 
women muffled in cloaks, who want but the coloured handker- 
chief twisted round the head to be completely French. The 
absence (above the Custom-House) of navigation, and of any 
very heavy traffic, save that destined apparently for the supply 
of the city with provisions ; what street traffic there is being 
carried on in low, clumsy-looking drays drawn by horses not 
inelegantly caparisoned, and notably resembling French char- 
rettes. The military police (there is a municipal force as 
well), the abundance of soldiers of all arms, the continual 
trotting of orderlies, and dusky bands of infantry going to 
relieve guard. , The noble public edifices, with bookstalls 
nestling under the lee of their porticos, and blind men 
basking in the sun on their steps. All these, with the sun 
and sky and genial atmosphere, are so many points of affinity 
between the quays of Eblana and Lutetia. 

We set out on our ramble down the length of the Quays at 
the Royal Barracks, close to Arbour Hill, where is the great 
military hospital, and adjoining the Phoenix Park. We stand 
before a huge pile of stone buildings, calculated, so my in- 
formation goes, to accommodate two regiments of cavalry and 
one of infantry. There is. not much to repay curiosity in a 
barrack, wherever it may be — whether on Dublin Quay or 
the Quai d'Orsay, or the Birdcage Walk, or in Berlin, 
Vienna, or St. Petersburg. When we say that a barrack 
is a barrack, all is pretty nearly told. The same listless men, 
in apparently unimprovable slovenliness, lolling out of open 
windows; the same men on guard in as apparently an unim- 



158 A PEEP AT DUBLIN. 

provable state of neatness and disciplined dandyism; the 
monotonous lines of walls and chimneys pierced by windows 
and doors; the same busy sergeants plodding past with parch- 
ment-covered books ; the same sergeant-major with the same 
stick ; the same weary parties at drill, looking very much as 
if they did not like it at all, which is very probable; the 
same slatternly women and children, with the unmistakeable 
baggage-waggon stamp about them ; the officers with their 
clanking sabres and bored expression of countenance, lounging 
to or from parade ; the dirty apparitions of men with dirty 
shirts and military trousers, baggy for want of braces, flitting 
across the level dusty square with baskets of coal, or wheel- 
barrows full of rubbish, or besoms worn to the stump ; the 
privates in knots of twos or threes lounging in and out, 
twirling cheap sticks or jingling their spurs ; the equivocal 
hangers-on ; the same one grave dog watching the sentinel 
on guard, which evidently belongs to "ours," and seems to 
know the countersign and to be ready to fly at anybody who 
does not ; the prevailing stillness, gravity, dulness, pigeon- 
holedness, ready to burst forth at a moment's notice with the 
blast of gunpowder, and the clang of steel, and alarums of 
drums and trumpets. 

Down the length of the Quays, beyond the barrack, past 
busy shops and through busy throngs, we find ourselves 
beside the oldest of the bridges. It is a grim grey structure 
of heavy frowning arches upon solid piers. This is called 
by the startling name of Bloody Bridge. Why, you shall 
hear. The first bridge was built of wood in sixteen hundred 
and seventy ; but in the following year a great riot took 
place among a body of apprentices, who assembled here for 
the purpose of pulling the bridge down. The soldiers were 
called out, and took some scores of the rioters into custody ; 
but, in an attempted rescue, several were killed and thrown 
from the bridge, and their blood mingling with the water 
went purpling down the Lifly. The bridge was reconstructed, 
afterwards, of stone ; but its evil name adhered to it, and it 
has been known ever since as Bloody Bridge. How many 
were hanged afterwards for taking part in this riot, besides 
those who fell by powder and lead, I know not ; but those 
were cruel days, and many swung I have no doubt. 



A PEEP AT DUBLIN. 159 

Two more bridges — the Queen's and Whitworth ; but just 
ere we come to the latter we pause before the Roman 
Catholic chapel of St. Paul, upon Arran Quay. Hither come 
on Sundays the Roman Catholic soldiers to attend mass. It 
is a sight to see them with their bright scarlet and brighter 
accoutrements. Pass Whitworth Bridge, and on the left 
bank of the Quays is a public building you have, I warrant, 
heard and read of many a time. On the site of a Dominican 
monastery, called St. Saviour's, was built, in 1776, a pile of 
buildings devoted to the judicature of the Chancery, King's 
Bench, Exchequer, and Common Pleas, and known commonly 
as the Four Courts. 

I have not the art of guide-book writing, or I would men- 
tion the exact dimensions of this noble structure, with full 
information in addition as to its friezes, entablatures, Corin- 
thian columns, statues, &c. As it is, I am content to enter 
the great circular hall, with twelve windows, crowned by a 
dome. This, during term time, is open to all — serving, indeed, 
the purpose of Westminster Hall in London, or the Salle des 
Pas Perdus in Paris ; and here for a contemplative man is 
food for thought sufficient to last him for a month. 

Suitors, witnesses, and idlers, mingle with vendors of watch- 
guards, dog-collars, combs, oranges, hundred-bladed knives, 
memorandum-books, almanacks, and sponges ; together with 
barristers, baristers' clerks, attorneys hard-faced and sleek- 
faced — all are mixed up in heterogeneous confusion. How 
many hundred million footsteps have been lost here, I wonder, 
since this hall was first paced ? How much of the dust has 
been the dust of that death that Yesterdays have lighted fools 
to ? Can the pavement of Hades show such a mosaic of good 
intentions as must be tesselated here ? Surely, there must 
have been sighs breathed and curses muttered enough in this 
hall to bring down the ponderous dome ; tears enough shed to 
evaporate to the lantern and run down the sides. Fortunes 
made and fortunes lost ; hopes deferred, and hearts sickened ; 
fierce hatreds, undying loves, blasted happiness, lust, dice, 
wine, horses ; every human virtue, every human passion, every 
human wish and aspiration, must have their silent chronicles 
lurking somewhere, now written in dust, and now in damp, 
and now in dirt — now notched in stone, now worn in staircases, 



160 A PEEP AT DUBLIN. 

now frayed from paint-denuded doors beneath, the dome of the 
Four Courts of Dublin. 

And still the pace goes on and the steps are lost. Affirma- 
tions, replications, and rejoinders, quillets and quibbles and 
quibbolets, affidavits false as dicers' oaths, faggot briefs, law 
calf, white faces, quivering lips, groans of impatience, curses 
of despair, shouts of triumph, malice, deceit, law-latin, law- 
logic, and law-justice ; and so the pace goes on, and the cases 
on the paper are proceeded with. "Who shall say when to 
end ? Is not litigation older than King Solomon and all his 
wisdom ? 

How many lord chancellors that were to be, have paced 
this hall briefless and in rusty gowns ? How many chancellors 
that are to be, pace it now in similar case ? Here, in the good 
old times, how many an amicable arrangement has been made 
for a deadly duel next morning in the " fifteen acres ? " How 
many ghosts must haunt this hall of barristers shot by bar- 
risters, plaintiffs shot by defendants ? What blood as well as 
dust in the Four Courts ! But that pace has ended, and hair- 
trigger footsteps are lost no more. 

We pass Richmond and Essex Bridges — the last named 
after an Earl of Essex who was lord-lieutenant here in 1676, 
and which is said to have been erected on the exact model of 
Westminster Bridge. It is of course smaller, but considerably 
handsomer, than that infirm old structure, which has been 
patched and cobbled so often, that, like Elwes the miser's 
worsted hose, scarcely any of the original fabric remains. 

Opposite to Essex Bridge, on Essex Quay, is the principal 
Presbyterian church in Dublin ; and, in the immediate neigh- 
bourhood, once stood one of the finest abbeys possessed by 
Dublin in the mediaeval times. There is scarcely a vestige of 
it remaining now, save a crypt in a sawyer's yard. 

Yet more quays, and more bridges. There is the metal 
bridge, constructed in 1816, and is 140 feet long, I am told, 
consisting of one bold elliptical arch. Another quay — still 
lined on one side by busy, bustling shops — and we approach 
the termination of our ramble. We stand upon Carlisle 
Bridge, the most crowded thoroughfare in Dublin, leading 
from Westmoreland Street, the Bank, the College, &c, to 
Sackville Street, the Post Office, and Nelson Column. 



A PEEP AT DUBLIN. 161 

Here, traveller, pause and gaze on the stately Custom-House, 
the ships — too few, alas ! — and the great port of Dublin. All 
lie eastward ; and eastward, too, stretch more quays, lined 
chiefly with shipping and bonding warehouses, and shops for 
the sale of ships' stores. Southward runs the stream of life 
and motion : — jaunting cars and carriages ; inside and outside 
cars ; officers on horseback ; parties of excursionists coming 
from the Exhibition ; laughing children and comely peasants. 
"Westward are the quays and bridges we have passed, and in 
the far-off distance rise, with purpling shadows against the 
summer sky, the crumbling towers of St. Audeon's and the 
Cathedral of Christ Church. The setting sun has bathed tower 
and spire, mast and cupola, water and quay, in one flood of 
golden light ; and the river dances, and the diamond-flashing 
windows seem to laugh, and from the crowds on the quays 
and streets comes up a cheerful murmur. 

From my window at home, in the twilight, I can still see 
the length of the quays, the houses, the bridges, and the 
people. Presently the twinkling lamps are lighted ; and these, 
with the gas-lit shops, and the deep red glow from the 
chemists, mirror themselves in the water, which grows darker 
and deeper every minute. As I think of the fair sights I have 
seen, some thoughts begin to deepen with the deepening twi- 
light. Amidst all the splendour of granite architecture and 
fluted columns I am constrained to remember many evidences 
of prosperity decayed and glories departed. That the Custom- 
House is wofully too large for any purposes of trade, and that 
the authorities have been compelled to utilise it for miscel- 
laneous public purposes ; that what should be a forest of masts 
is but a thicket ; that the great Linen Hall is turned into a 
barrack ; the noble Royal Exchange into a police office ; that 
everywhere and on all sides there are stately shells standing 
with but dry and shivered kernels ; that, in a room in Henri- 
etta Street, called the Encumbered Estates Court, from the 
time of its establishment up to the month of March last, there 
passed under the judicial hammer one million and a half acres 
of land, or something more than one-fourteenth of the entire 
arable superficies of the island (but it is a consoling reflection 
that these broad acres fetched unhoped-for prices, and that 
the new hands into which they have fallen will be able to 



162 A PEEP AT DUBLIN. 

deal better with, them than when they were hampered and 
encumbered). But what a history of year-long misery, and 
reckless extravagance, and desperation, seems to unfold itself 
at the bare enumeration of those figures? They seem to 
answer the whole question of Irish distress at once. 

Bring in the lights, for the twilight has deepened into night, 
and the room is full of shadow. 



AN IEISH STEW. 

ANOTHER PEEP AT DUBLIN. 



I hate found them ! The rags, the bones, the sawdust, 
and the dirt, which I was at first unable, as I endeavoured to 
explain in the foregoing paper, to discover in Dublin. But I 
have found them now. Not in Sackville Street, or Westmore- 
land Street, or Dame Street, or Grafton Street ; not in aristo- 
cratic Merrion Square or College, or Stephen's Green ; not in 
the Phoenix Park — but in the Coombe. 

A swift steam-engine has wafted me from the ancient city 
of Chester, across, or rather through, the great tubular bridge, 
through the picturesque Welsh country, by a multiplicity of 
stations whose names, being utterly unpronounceable, it would 
be a waste of time to transcribe here, to the promontorial port 
called Holyhead. Whence a sea-monster has borne me across 
St. George's Channel. It has borne me to the clean sparkling 
suburb of Kingstown — once an unaristocratic, humble, lobster- 
smelling little village, called Dunleary ; but since the visit of 
the Georgium Sidus to Ireland, in 1821, baptised, and thence- 
forward known as Kingstown. I may observe, however, that 
while he was about it, the regal toucher for the evil of nomen- 
clature might have changed the three stations on the road 
between Kingstown and Dublin: Booterstown, Black Rock, 
and Salt Hill, into Pump-ville, Jet-ornament, and Salinopolis, 
or something pretty of that description. 

So I have come to Dublin, and I have taken my fill of the 
monuments and public buildings, and of the Industrial Exhi- 
bition. But I have been keeping a wary look-out meanwhile 
in the rag and bone interest ; hence I found myself in the 
Coombe. I did not know then that the Coombe was the 
Coombe ; so I straggled out of it again, bewildered, dazed, in 
a labyrinth of dirty streets, rubbing the eyes of my mind, as 
one of the Seven Sleepers might have rubbed his corporeal 

M 2 



164 AN IRISH STEW. 

eyes on his first ramble after his nap. The Lord -Lieutenant 
(whose carriage I stopped to see sweep out of the Vice-regal 
yard into Dame Street) was the primary cause of my wandering 
Coombe-wise ; but a personage somewhat removed from him 
in worldly station and appearance was the secondary loadstone 
which pointed to this pole. This was no other than a Dublin 
fishwoman, very much disguised or rather undisguised in rage 
and alcohol, who was scattering the flowers of her eloquence 
broadcast on a female with a barrow at the door of a whiskey- 
shop — the casus belli being a disputed question as to the right 
of property in a flat-iron — here called a " smooth." " Isn't 
it the smooth that's mine?" and " Sure it's not a skirrick of 
it that's yours !" were bandied about for some time, till the 
dealer in mollusca, after the manner of persons quarrelling, 
diverged from the main point at issue to some retrospective 
griefs and torts by her suffered at the hands of her opponent. 
" Isn't it yerself," demanded this female Demosthenes in a 
concluding Philippic, "that daren't go to chapel, forbye 
Father M'Anasser forbad ye ivery brick of it ? Isn't it yerself 
that kem down only Wednesday was a fortnight to the corner 
of the Coombe, foreninst the whole world, and called me a 
murthering ould excommunicated gasometer ? " With which 
latter trope she folded her arms, and looked oyster-knives at 
her enemy. 

At the corner of the Coombe ! Where was the Coombe ? 
I had heard that St. Patrick's Cathedral, which I was anxious 
to see, was down in the Coombe, but the guide-books were ail 
silent as to where the Coombe was. I found the Coombe — 
which is indeed a very long, straggling estuary between 
houses (I cannot call it a street) running from the bottom of 
Francis Street to Ardee Street and Pimlico, and possessing 
vomitoria seemingly innumerable, in the shape of lanes, back 
streets, courts, and blind alleys — to be a thoroughfare of the 
same description as its neighbour, with a strong additional 
dash of Petticoat Lane, Broker's Row in Birmingham, and 
Newgate Market ; but with an almost indescribable aspect of 
dirt and confusion, semi-continental picturesqueness, shabbi- 
ness — less the shabbiness of dirt than that of untidiness — 
over-population, and redolent of an odour perfectly original 
and peculiarly its own. I wandered up and down and about 



AN IRISH STEW. 165 

the Coombe for hours, till I was hungry, thirsty, and 
tired, and I would strongly advise all travellers in Ireland, 
all painters of still life and genre subjects, and lovers of the 
picturesque catholicity, by no means to omit a walk in the 
Coombe when they visit Dublin, the silence of the guide-books 
and the ciceroni notwithstanding. Let me see if I can, in my 
small way, recall a few of the oddities I saw. 

First, the old clothes. A man who has seen the Temple in 
Paris, and Rag Fair in London, is apt to imagine that very 
little can astonish him in the cast-off garment line. Let him 
come to the Coombe. This, its subsidiaries, succursals, and 
tributaries, don't teem but swarm, don't swarm but burst, 
with old clothes. Here is a shop out of a hundred which is a 
mass of old clothes, so thickly sown, so deeply heaped, that 
the proprietor and proprietors, squatting among them smoking 
their pipes, look like bundles of old clothes (they are little 
else) themselves. Every imaginable article of male and 
female attire seems clustered together in this shop. The 
broken windows have old clothes stuffed into their shattered 
panes ; the sleeping department of the establishment is walled 
off by a screen of old gowns and petticoats ; the wind is 
excluded by old stockings thrust into chinks, and sleeve- 
less coats laid at the bottoms of doors. There is a tattered 
shawl for a carpet, and a fragment of some under-garment 
for a table cloth ; old clothes for counterpanes, old clothes for 
window curtains; the pockets of old clothes (I shouldn't 
wonder) for corner cupboards. All the mortals that sleep in 
the valley of dry bones seem to have left their garments 
here. All Jason's army must have deposited their civilian's 
costume or "mufti" in the Coombe, before they went into 
uniform, and took the dragon' s-tooth bounty — stay ! another 
solution : this is what becomes of our old clothes. How 
many jackets, pinafores, petticoats, tunics, skeleton-suits, tail 
coats, frock coats, pantaloons, waistcoats, pairs of boots and 
shoes, hats, caps, shirts, and stockings, have we had since we 
were children, and where are they now ? Has any man or 
woman a complete set of his or her wearing apparel from his 
or her youth upwards ? If any such, let him or her stand forth ! 
Some we may have given to our valets (such of us as possess 
such retainers) ; some we may have bartered, sold, lost, or 



166 AN IRISH STEW. 

had stolen from us. But all cannot have gone this way. 
Neither can we wear a garment (be it ever so threadbare — 
ever so tattered) but some vestige, some remnant must remain 
(though I once knew an Irish gentleman who was assured, 
and convincingly so, by his valet, that he had worn a favourite 
green hunting-coat for which he made inquiry — " clean out."). 
What, then, becomes of the old clothes ? This : they take 
unto themselves wings and fly away — to the Coombe. 

Yes, here they all are, and you may see yourself retrospec- 
tively in a mirror of rags. Here is the black frock and black 
sash and broad-flapped hat with the black plume you wore for 
your father's death. You wear these rags, ay ! You wonder 
now, Madam, whether you could ever have worn them, as 
much as when at five years old you marvelled why they were 
substituted for the glowing plaid merino and showy Leghorn 
purchased for you only three weeks before. Here are your 
first school-clothes, good sir, the marks of the wiped pen yet 
on cuff and collar, the whitened elbows attesting how doggedly 
you leant with them on the desk, over verbum personate — the 
wrinkled arms, and frayed cuffs, and cracked seams, bearing 
witness how much too big you grew for that last jacket before 
you were provided with a new one. Here is the tail coat you 
courted your first wife in ; here in dank sable tatters is 
the black suit you wore at her funeral, and here are the 
blue body coat and fawn-coloured kerseymeres you made the 
second Mrs. Reader a happy woman in. Here is your school- 
master's grey duffel dressing-gown, the very sight of which 
throws a shudder through you, even now ; your grandmother's 
well-remembered black satin (worn only on high days and 
holidays, and reposing during the rest of the year in a dilapi- 
dated piebald hair trunk like a quadrangular cow) ; your sister's 
cashmere shawl you brought her after your first voyage, and in 
the centre of which Gyp the puppy bit a neat polygonal hole. 
Here are all the boots and shoes you ever wore — that have 
paced the deck, or plodded Cheapside, or tripped along chalked 
floors to merry tunes, or crawled through mud and mire up to 
high places, or shuffled about prison-yards, or faltered in 
docks, or stumbled in drawing-rooms, or kept the " pot a 
boiling," or stood on the damp ground over the dampest 
clay beside the dampest grave, while you peered down to 



AN IRISH STEW. 167 

see the last of kindred or of love. Oh man, man, go to 
the Coonibe and learn ! Strive not to read futurity, but 
con over that past which is surely spread out before you 
there in ragged leaves. Did the Teufelsdrock of Carlyle's 
Sartor Resartus ever come to the Coonibe? If he live yet 
— and when will he die ! — let him come. 

Seriously, (if among bizarre and fantastic speculations a 
man can claim credit for seriousness) there is really and truly 
a cause for this extraordinary accumulation of old clothes not 
only in the Coombe, but in every back street of Dublin. The 
Irish, from the peasantry even to the numerous class of petty 
shopkeepers and mechanics, are, it is patent, almost universal 
wearers of old clothes. At what season of national depres- 
sion, what climax of suffering and destitution, they were first 
reduced to this degrading strait is yet to be discovered ; but 
to this day, and in this day, thousands of persons (whose 
equals in England would disdain it) are content to wear 
second-hand garments — not only outer, but inner and under. 
Again, the great exodus, which every year takes tens of thou- 
sands of Irishmen from their native shores (principally to 
America), creates an enormous demand for second-hand wear- 
ing apparel ; for in the United States clothes are among the 
very dearest articles of supply, and a newly arrived emigrant 
without money or without some wardrobe, however tattered, 
would soon have to go as Adam did. And again, many many 
hundreds of poor creatures (I have seen it and know it) are 
only enabled to cross from Dublin to Liverpool (even on the 
deck with the pigs and geese) at the sacrifice of a waistcoat, a 
shawl, or a coat, sold for anything they will fetch. 'In like 
manner, in Liverpool, is the passage-money to New York often 
completed, or the miserable stock of provisions eked out, by 
the sale of such old clothes as can be spared. Thus a great 
system of clothes barter and exchange, sale, purchase, and 
re-sale, goes on in Ireland, Step into the many old clothes 
depots about Rag Fair, or the Clothes Exchange in London, 
and ask the dealer where the majority of his stock is to be 
exported to. He will tell you to Ireland — for the Irish 
market. I dare say many gentlemen of the Irish press would 
vehemently deny this, and assert that the Celt, their com- 
patriot, never condescends to wear anything but spick and 



168 AN IRISH STEW. 

span new broadcloth ; and denouncing my atrocious menda- 
city and general Saxon brutality, insinuate besides that I 
murdered Eliza Grimwood, fomented the Gunpowder Plot, 
and set the Thames on fire ; but the Coombe is my evidence 
on the old clothes question, and I will stick to it. 

Diverging, temporarily, a little from the Coombe I enter 
Patrick Street, which leads to Patrick's Close, and to the great 
Protestant Cathedral of St. Patrick. Patrick Street is of the 
Coombe, Coombish. One side is occupied by an imposing 
manifestation of the old clothes interest, the other by a con- 
tinuous line of stalls for the sale of butcher' s-meat and provi- 
sions in general — the stalls being overshadowed by projecting 
bulkheads prodigiously productive of chiaro oscuro, pictures- 
queness, rottenness, and dinginess. This and the neighbour- 
hood is the most ancient, the raggedest, dirtiest, wretchedest, 
part of Dublin's proud city. I become sensible of the presence 
of incalculable swarms of tattered children, nearly all without 
shoes or stockings, and the average number of whose articles 
of dress varies from one and a half to two and three-eighths ; 
likewise of a multiplicity of grown-up females, also barefooted 
— the elder ones astoundingly hideous, the younger ones not 
unfrequently exceedingly well favoured, and, for all their bare 
feet, modest and demure. The men seem to carry the allow- 
ance of shoes for both sexes, exhibiting their lower extremities 
cased in huge shoes, which in heavy weather on heavy roads 
must make walking anything but a labour of love. I opine 
the men of all ages and the women of mature years are nearly 
all smoking the national short-pipe, its top protected by a 
small leaden cupola, perforated, like a miniature dish-cover 
with a hole in it. And I cannot fail to observe a salient and 
a melancholy national peculiarity in men and women and 
children. They all crouch, or loll, or cower, or lean on some- 
thing somehow — on door-steps and counters, over chairs and 
window-sills. The climate is not sultry, it is not enervating ; 
yet here they crouch, and cower, and loll, and lean, with the 
same pervading, listless, wearied, blase expression. The first 
thing I saw on landing at Kingstown was a railway porter, 
lounging with both elbows outspread over a truck, with a 
thoroughly "used up" and languid air; and I see scores of 
counter-parts of him as I walk along Patrick Street. 









AN IRISH STEW. 169 

You will say that a visit to any London or Anglo-provincial 
district, colonised by Irish, will show you what I have been 
describing ; but there are sights here, in addition, that you 
will not see out of Patrick Street and the Coombe. Groups 
of men and children carrying neatly-cut sods of " turfs," peat 
sods for fuel, about for sale; little dusky shops, full of big 
white jugs and huge iron-hooped buckets and churns full of 
buttermilk; more pork and bacon and eggs within a few 
square yards than you would see in some town-miles ; open 
shops like coal sheds, but where, instead of coals, there are 
piles on piles, and sacks on sacks, of potatoes, which the 
dealers are shovelling and carting about as though they really 
were coals, and to show the quality of which for the behoof 
of customers there is, on a little tripod, a plate of brown- 
jacketed murphies ready boiled and half-peeled ; numerous 
stalls for the sale of salt fish — cod and ling — for this is Friday, 
and the Coombe, though hard by the cathedral close, is 
Catholic ; sweep and dustman's carts jogging slowly by — the 
cart a long low contrivance like a horse-trough on wheels, 
and the vicinity of its owner being announced by a bell 
attached to a wire on the horse's collar. Lastly, all through 
Patrick Street and the Coombe, and Francis Street and the 
vicinity, one corner of every outlet, sometimes both, are gar- 
nished with a grocer's shop, and also a tobacconist's, and also 
a whiskey shop. The author of Lalla Rookh and the Loves 
of the Angels was born in such a shop. 

At the first cursory view, Dublin seems very deficient in 
houses of public entertainment. No swinging doors invite 
the passer by — no glistening bars dazzle the toper's eyes. He 
sees plenty of hotels and plenty of grocers, but few what may 
be called public-houses. When, however, he has been a very 
few days in Dublin, he discovers that in almost every " hotel " 
(the Sackville Street and aristocratic ones I exclude of course) 
he may be provided with refreshment as moderate as a 
"dandy" of punch, or modicum of whiskey and hot water, 
which costeth twopence ; or that in almost every shop where 
tea and coffee and sugar are sold, there also is sold the 
enlivening beverage extolled by poets but denounced by Father 
Mathew, the " rale potheen," from a pennyworth up to a 
gallon, which costeth eight shillings. There are, I believe, 



170 AN IRISH STEW. 

some excise and municipal regulations, limiting the drinking 
of whiskey on the premises, which prompt some grocers of 
tender consciences to provide back yards, with back outlets, 
into which customers accidentally stray to drink their whiskey, 
and find, as accidentally, such waifs and strays as "mate- 
rials," i. e., hot water, sugar, and lemons, under a water-butt, 
or what not ; but, in general, there seems no disguise about 
the matter ; and, in the dram-drinking line, the grocery as 
plainly means whiskey, as, in England, the Alton ale-house 
means beer. * 

I turn into Bull Alley, a very narrow and filthy little bulk- 
headed avenue of butchers' stalls — the very counterpart of a 
street in Stamboul. I have but time to notice that the 
butchers' wives and daughters are very rosy and comely-look- 
ing — as all butchers' wives and daughters in all climes and 
countries seem to be — and make my escape as soon as ever I 
can ; for Bull Alley has anything but an agreeable perfume, 
and there are puddles of blood between the uneven paving- 
stones, and should an animal of the species from which this 
narrow alley derives its name be disposed to manifest himself 
therein (which I do not consider unlikely), stung to frenzy by 
a " sense of injured merit/' I would rather be anywhere else, 
so I wend my way into Patrick's Close, 

Where, looming large in the very midst of the old clothes, 
dirt, bare feet, slaughter-houses, and whiskey-shops, is the 
metropolitan church of Dublin — the Cathedral of St. Patrick. 
It is a venerable majestic building — a chaste and elegant 
example of that most glorious period of pointed Gothic architec- 
ture, the close of the twelfth century. Originally built, so it is 
said, by St. Patrick, the present church dates from the year 
1190, when John Comyn, Archbishop of Dublin, demolished 
the elder structure. 

It is magnificent in conception and detail, built in 
uniform style, with a glorious nave and transept, a chapter- 
house and a Lady chapel. The banners of the Knights of St 
Patrick hang over the arches of the nave. There is a fine 
choir, and monumental tombs, and cathedral service daily ; 
but, within and without, the whole fabric .is in a lamentable 
state of decay, and the feelings that come over one in gazing 
on it are inexpressibly melancholy. With its gray tower and 






AN IRISH STEW. 171 

noble proportions it dominates the city ; but it stands here an 
anomaly, a discrepancy, an almost unused fane, unreverenced, 
unsympathised with, unhonoured, disavowed, disliked. 

In St. Patrick's Cathedral are the tombs of Dean Swift ; of 
the woman who loved him so truly, and whom he used with 
such fantastic cruelty, the unfortunate Stella (Mrs. Hester 
Johnson) ; of Michael Tregury, Archbishop of Dublin ; of the 
famous Duke Schomberg, killed at the battle of the Boyne, 
in 1690; and of Richard Boyle, Earl of Cork. The noise 
and riot and lumbering cars and waggons in the Coombe 
will not wake them, though they may shake the chain near 
the communion table, from which hangs the cannon ball that 
dealt the death-blow to General St. Ruth at 'the battle of 
Aughrim, in 1691. Hie we back to the Coombe. 

Pursuing my further researches in this interesting district, 
I am struck by the apparently irresistible liking that the Irish 
have for hanging miscellaneous articles, principally rags, 
from their windows. Pantaloons, coats, and body-linen, and 
textile odds and ends of every imaginable hue and stage of 
raggedness, flutter and dangle from poles and nails and clothes 
lines from every window. The effect in the Coombe and in 
the numerous little vomitoria I have hinted at adjoining it, 
is pictorial, scenic, continental in the highest degree, but 
scarcely, I should say, conducive to interior comfort — a defect 
I have somewhat largely observed in this aspect of the 
picturesque, in the course of my small travels. Further, I 
confess my inability to discover why the male portion of the 
Coombian population should monopolise the whole available 
stock of boots and shoes and hose, to the detriment of the 
ladies of Coombianse ; why they should appear to hold soap 
and water in such apparent detestation — the Liffey being 
close at hand, and a clear stream ; and why they should not 
live a little less like pigs, and a little more like human 
beings. 



A GOOD CHAMPION; 

OR, 
THE LITTLE BLUE MANTLE 



On the fourth of June, 1852, a modest funeral procession 
entered the cemetery of Castel-Censoir, in France. The 
defunct, to whom the last offices of humanity were being 
rendered, and on whose plain coffin a drizzling rain fell, had 
gained no great victories, had conducted no intricate negocia- 
tions, had left no niche unoccupied in the temples of literature 
or art. At very nearly the same period, in Paris, was taking 
place the funeral of Pradhier, the famous sculptor. Artists, 
savants, members of the Academic and of the Institute in their 
official costumes, and aides-de-camp of the Prince President, 
were there ; the carriages of the aristocracy followed the bier, 
and a battalion of infantry formed a line on either side. But 
*in this procession, personages of no higher authority than a 
parish priest, the mayor of a humble French township, and a 
brigadier of rural gendarmerie, were present. The spectacle 
derived its interest not from the rank, the talents, or the 
riches of the deceased ; but from his blameless character, his 
many and truly Christian virtues, his inexhaustible and un- 
tiring charity, and the fact of his last home being selected in 
the midst of a village he had almost created, and the midst 
of a population many of whom he had fed, and clothed, and 
comforted, for half a century. 

On its way to the churchyard, the procession wound 
through trees planted under his direction, over roads paved at 
his expense, by fields reclaimed and wells dug by his orders. 
It is no exaggeration to state, that his coffin was followed by 
the whole population of the place ; by young aiid old, pro- 
prietors and labourers, by the lame, the halt, and the blind, 
bewailing in him the loss of a common benefactor and a com- 



A GOOD CHAMPION. 173 

mon friend. As the procession neared the cemetery gate, the 
sun shone for a moment on the bier, lighting up the cross of 
the Legion of Honour, and a weather-stained, threadbare 
little blue mantle. These were his trophies, his shield 
and scutcheon. 

Edme Champion, better known as le petit manteau bleu, from 
the short blue cloak he constantly wore, was born and died at 
Castel-Censoir ; he began life in 1768, and was consequently 
eighty-four years of age at the time of his death. His parents 
were poor bargees ; his mother, the daughter of a small pro- 
prietor in somewhat easier circumstances, had been discarded 
and disinherited by her father for . contracting an unequal 
match, and from infancy the little Edme was the victim of 
her soured temper and of a spirit chafed by ill-borne poverty. 
He was left an orphan and perfectly destitute at a very early 
age. The almshouse would have been his only refuge, had 
it not been for a lady who succeeded in getting extended to 
him the benefits of a charity for apprenticing poor fatherless 
children. He was consequently apprenticed to a jeweller; 
who, however, chose rather to teach him the art of peeling 
potatoes and cleaning boots and shoes, than that of distin- 
guishing between rose and table diamonds. Outraged by a 
long course of neglect and ill-treatment, he ran away, and 
remained concealed for a whole day and night in the wood of 
Vincennes, where he was found by a kind-hearted garde 
champetre, who not only relieved his necessities, but made his 
peace with his master, and succeeded in having his indentures 
transferred to another jeweller — the famous German, Baumer 
— who understood and performed his duty towards his appren- 
tice, and taught him his trade conscientiously. In course of 
time, Edme Champion became an expert workman, and one of 
the most acute judges of precious stones in Paris. In after 
life, M. Champion used frequently to relate that he himself, 
as a workman, carried the great diamond necklace to the 
Cardinal de Rohan, in the extraordinary history of which that 
prelate, the Queen Marie Antoinette, and Balsamo, better 
known as Count Cagliostro, were implicated. The workman 
afterwards became chief clerk to his master, and at last head 
of an extensive establishment on his own account. He was 
nearly ruined by the Revolution ; but the assistance of a 



174 A GOOD CHAMPION. 

friend, who confided to him 100,000 francs — his whole for- 
tune, and for which, so much confidence had he in the honour 
of his debtor, he would take neither acknowledgment nor 
security — enabled him to weather the storm. Those were 
bad times for jewellers; and Napoleon, even in 1804, was 
rather at a loss to find credit for his imperial crown, till 
Biennais stepped forward to his assistance. " In fact," the 
Emperor said afterwards, laughing, " Biennais must have 
believed strongly in me, for political firms often went bankrupt 
in those days." As for Edme Champion, he recovered his 
position under the Empire and the Restoration, under which 
latter Government he jinally retired from business with a 
large fortune. Early accustomed to misery and privation, 
and the spectator of misery and privation in others, he had 
always been charitable according to his means; but, from the 
period of his retirement to that of his death, he devoted him- 
self exclusively to acts of munificence. From 1824 to 1852, 
his memoirs may be summed up in saying that he went about 
doing good. He made an honourable provision for his family ; 
the residue of his fortune he held in trust for the poor, and 
was a faithful steward. Clad in his little blue mantle, he 
went about from house to house, from street to street, from 
one loathsome den to another, down infected alleys, up rotten 
staircases into foul garrets, feeding the hungry, clothing the 
naked, drying the tears of the fatherless. He, the police, and 
the priests, were the repositories of the gigantic miseries of 
Paris. In those severe winters which, in continental cities 
especially, produce appalling misery, the figure of a man in a 
blue cloak seemed to multiply itself indefinitely wherever the 
snow clung to the black walls. There appeared to be, not 
one, but legions of little blue mantles, trotting about (which 
was strictly his mode of walking) with prodigious activity, 
bearing herculean loads of shoes, worsted stockings, and great 
white jugs of soup, as though they were feathers. I have 
heard, from a source whose authenticity I have no reason to 
doubt, that in one winter, in the one city of Paris, he dis- 
tributed with his own hands 15,000 bowls of soup. The 
ragged prowling wretches who ulcerate Paris would wait 
patiently for hours on his track, and catching sight of his 
well-known blue cloak in the distance, would say, " Ah, here 



A GOOD CHAMPION. 175 

comes the little blue mantle. We are going to get something 
to eat !" Waistcoats and shoes were, however, his specialities. 
A benumbed wretch would be shivering in a gateway, tightly 
embracing his bare chest with his shrunken arms : Little 
Blue Mantle would collar him fiercely ; force him severely 
into a warm woollen waistcoat ; and before the man could 
thank him, Little Blue Mantle would be a hundred yards 
away, brandishing his soup jugs. A little half-congealed 
atomy of a girl would be crying on a door-step, her poor 
shoeless feet quite violet with the pitiless cold : incontinent 
she would be caught up from behind, seated on a pair of 
friendly knees, told half a merry story ; and a minute after, 
left staggering in the unwonted luxury of a whole pair of 
shoes. * 

I Deed not say that this man was adored by the poor ; that 
mothers brought their children to him for a benediction, as to 
a priest ; that in the awful habitations he almost alone 
ventured into, thieves and murderers would have rent each 
other in pieces before they would have suffered a hair of his 
head to be touched. I have conversed with a gentleman who 
assured me that, on one occasion, a great hulking savage 
giant of a horse-slaughterer, the terror even of his savage 
quarter, fell on his knees before him and exclaimed (with 
perfect French bombast, but with perfect sincerity,) " And is 
it possible that such a man can walk on eartliV He expected 
to see full-fledged wings sprout from the Little Blue Mantle. 

Yet I find it nowhere on record that M. Edme Champion 
was vain, or self-sufficient, or insolent. He was the pioneer, 
the interpreter, and the coadjutor of the priest. His charity 
ever went hand in hand with religion, and was its meet 
and willing helpmate. 

Paris was his great working field , he loved to struggle 
with great miseries ; but he never neglected nor forgot his 
native place. He was ever about some of the improvements 
I have mentioned in the commencement of this paper ; no tale 
of misery from Castel-Censoir ever found his ear deaf or inat- 
tentive. In the winter of 1829-30, one of almost unexampled 
severity, he says, in a letter to the Mayor of Castel-Censoir : 
" . . . As the severity of the winter seems to be on the 
increase be good enough to distribute, Monsieur, as they are 



176 A GOOD CHAMPION. 

needed, coals, fuel, shoes, blankets, and such like : " and he 
goes on to indicate the bakers, drapers, &c, to be dealt with, 
and the agents to be drawn upon for funds. He frequently- 
visited his beloved birthplace ; where he was, neither more 
nor less, the counterpart of Pope's " Man of Ross;" and, 
during one of these visits, he underwent a very severe grief. 
A plantation, his property, was destroyed by fire, and rumour 
whispered that the conflagration was the work of an incen- 
diary. Edme Champion struggled long and direfully against 
the doleful suspicion ; but, one day, two peasants presented 
themselves before him, and intimated that they were the sole 
depositories of the secret of the destruction of his trees. 
Refusing to hear another word of this dreadful confidence, 
Little Blue Mantle dragged them into the village church, and 
made them swear, before the altar, that they would lock the 
secret, if any existed, in their own breasts, and never reveal 
it, save under seal of confession on their death-beds. Then 
he dismissed them with a present of money. 

Little Blue Mantle took frequent flying visits of charity into 
other parts of France — short pleasure trips of beneficence. 
These were so numerous, and the good man took them so 
much as a matter of course, that few can be known but of the 
immediate circle of the parties concerned. It is related, how- 
ever, that on one occasion he was informed of the residence in 
a small village of an old lady, of noble birth, who had lost all 
her relations by the guillotine ; and who, converting her few 
jewels into ready money, had retired to an obscure cottage, 
where she lived in great poverty and privation. Almost 
paralytic, she was compelled to have recourse to the assistance 
of an attendant, and engaged a delicate girl, some eighteen 
years of age, the daughter of poor parents in the neighbour- 
hood. Constant illness exhausted the poor paralytic's store, 
when her youthful nurse, who already worked at her needle 
by day in part support of her own family, devoted a greater 
portion of every night to work to procure bread for her help- 
less old charge. Little Blue Mantle was soon on the spot ; 
conversed with the invalid and her nurse ; and on leaving, not 
liking to wound the delicacy of either, left a little store of gold 
pieces on the mantel-piece. He returned in a few weeks, 
when the young girl, who was rapidly losing her health 



A GOOD CHAMPION. 177 

through over-exertion, handed him his gold, supposing that 
he had left it on the mantel -piece by accident. For once 
Little Blue Mantle repented of his shame-faced benevolence ; 
had he been a little less delicate, this poor couple would not 
have been starving in the midst of plenty. But he succeeded 
in making the poor needle-worker accept his assistance, and 
left directions with a tradesman in the village to watch over 
her, and administer to her wants. A few months afterwards 
he returned again ; the poor paralytic was dead, — and his 
protegee ? She was at the Chateau. To the Chateau went 
Little Blue Mantle, and there he found a handsome young 
man, and a blooming, well-dressed young lady. The squire 
had heard the story of the devoted little nurse, had become 
attached to her, and had married her. The story is thoroughly 
French, and thoroughly true to French nature. 

And so, through long years, went trotting about on his 
Master's business Edme Champion, the man in the little blue 
mantle. It may be objected that his charity was indiscriminate, 
and that he may have relieved rogues and vagabonds, as well 
as the virtuous poor. I am not aware that he understood any- 
thing about poor laws, old or new ; about prison discipline, or 
the workhouse test ; or that he had the least idea of political 
economy. He was a simple man, with little lore, but surely 
with a large heart. 

At length, in extreme old age, he felt his end approaching. 
Beloved and revered by his family and friends, the Govern- 
ment had heard of his unobtrusive merits and awarded him 
the cross of the Legion of Honour. He took it as he took all 
things, pleasantly and thankfully. He expressed a few days 
before his death a longing to die in his native place — dans son 
pays, as the French affectionately express it. Although not 
attacked with any mortal malady, he seemed to know that 
his time was come, and said to his friends, " Adieu ! you will 
see me no more." He had scarcely arrived at Castel Censoir, 
when he fell down dead. His end can scarcely be called 
sudden, for it was anticipated and prepared for. " He had 
everything to hope, and nothing to fear.'' The mercy he had 
so often shown to others seemed shown to him, in sparing him 
the agonies of a protracted struggle with death. 

He sleeps in his quiet grave, and no monumental victories 



178 A GOOD CHAMPION. 

\rill sound trumpets over it. But his fame is written in that 
most indelible of pages, the remembrance of the people ; and 
fifty years hence, beneath the cotter or the workman's roof, 
the garrulous grannam will gather the little children round 
her knee by the bright fire, and when they are tired — if 
children of any growth ever can be tired — of hearing of the 
exploits of kings and conquerors, tell them of the good deeds 
of Little Blue Maxtle. 



SUNDAY MOKNING. 



It is a question not, I think, beneath the dignity of the 
philosopher and psychologist to discuss whether, supposing 
our dear old friend Eobinson Crusoe to have lost count of a 
few days during his stay on the island of Juan Fernandez, he 
would have been enabled to correct the notches on that dear 
old post — Heaven's blessings upon it, how it stands up in the 
plain of my childhood, sun-lighted for ever ! by intuitively 
knowing Sunday as soon as it came round. My theory is that 
he would : my opinion is, that there is something in and 
about the aspect of the Sabbath so contra- distinguished from 
other days, so perfectly sui generis, that, the wide world over, 
the cognizance and recognition of Sunday are innate and 
intuitive. It is not like other days; the air, the stillness, 
the noise, are not like those of other days. There is rain on 
a wet Sunday, and rain on a wet Monday ; but they are not 
the same rains by any means. The Sunday sunshine and 
the Saturday sunshine both light us and warm us and cheer 
us ; but the sunny Saturday is far different from the sunny 
Sunday. 

I do not hold with Sir Andrew Agnew. I do not row in 
the same boat with the crusaders against Sunday oranges and 
Sunday orange-women. I cannot pin my faith to the statute 
of King Charles the Second (a pretty fellow to force sours on 
Sunday as on vegetables that are none the better for pickling). 
I cannot see perdition in a Sabbath-sewed-on shirt-button; the 
bottomless pit in a Sunday-baked pie ; Tophet in the boiler 
of a Sunday steamboat. I do not feel inclined to blacken the 
reputation of my friend the Pot because he enjoys himself on a 
Sunday, seeing that he, in his turn, might say something severe 
of my mamma the Kettle. If we "maunna wheestle on a 
Soonday," my friends beyond the Grampians, we "maunna " 
drink quite so much whiskey between services. I cannot, in 

N 2 



180 SUNDAY MORNING. 

conclusion, see any reason why, because it is Sunday, a man 
should half throttle himself with a white neckcloth ; turn his 
eyes all ways save the natural one; and put on a look of 
excruciating wretchedness and anguish when he is naturally 
inclined to be cheerful. Excuse me if I use strong language, 
but I feel strongly ; and, do not think me scoffing or irre- 
verent, if, acknowledging my respect for missionary enterprise 
and perseverance and sincerity, I confess my inability to 
believe in the conversion of that New Zealand chieftain, who, 
having been educated at a missionary station, was in after 
years questioned by one of his reverend friends as to his 
spiritual progress, and, on being pressed, avowed that he had 
not been quite able to give up cannibalism, but that he 
"nebber eat him enemies on a Sunday, now." 

Sunday morning in town and country : let me essay, with 
my blunt pencil, to sketch some Sunday morning draughts. 

What sort of a Sunday morning could that have been of 
the 18th of June, 1815, when the two great armies of the 
English and the French lay opposite each other (after couching 
uneasily in their muddy lairs all Saturday night), like wild 
beasts, ready to rend each other in pieces presently ? Gunner 
and Driver number seven, as he pushes and labours, and toils 
and moils at the wheels of yonder great piece of ordnance, 
overhauling and sponging out the creature's mouth to see 
that it is ready for roaring and biting, does he think of the 
bloody Sunday's work he is upon, — that it was on a Sunday 
morning that the great Untiring Hand yet chose to rest from 
the labours of Creation ? Gunner and Driver number seven, 
as, wiping the sweat from off his anxious face, he scans the 
trees and farms and cottages as well as he can for a rainy 
mist, — does it ever strike him that the grey church of 
Waterloo yonder was meant to be something else than a 
mere "position" — than a place to hold or defend, or to 
assault and attack — than a thing to batter and rear great 
guns against, and throw red-hot shot into, or may be, after 
the battle, to establish an hospital or litter down troop horses 
in ? Comes there ever a thought across this rude fighting 
man that there are villages and village churches in his own 
land of England ? — notably a little, grey, ivy-coloured fane 
" down in his part of the country ; " a church with a leaden 



SUNDAY MORNING. 181 

spire and a thatched roof, and little lozenge casements 
glistening like diamonds : a church with a rebellious sea of 
churchyard, all stormy waves of turf, crested with breakers 
of white tombstone, surging up viciously against the church, 
and threatening to break through its Gothic windows, and 
quite submerge that smug Corinthian porch the last vicar 
(who had a pretty taste for building, confound him !) raised, 
rolling its verdant billows to rocks a-head of family vaults, 
and the low encompassing stone wall. Here he played, years 
ago, before ever he thought of 'listing, or of being a Gunner 
and Driver, or of fighting anybody on a Sunday morning ; 
were it not, indeed, Tom the blacksmith's son, or Toby Crance 
who lived " along o' Saunders," which last — the self-styled 
cock of the village — he, the embryo Gunner, met on a 
Sabbath morning and "paid," knocking him from his cockish 
eminence, crowing, to the very bottom of a muck-midden, 
where he lay howling amongst the mire ; for which exploit 
he (Gunner) was sorely scourged next morning by the school- 
master, a learned man, who could talk like a book, and had 
a wonderful property of boxing your ears, sitting the while 
at his desk, were you ever so many feet off. Many a 
Sunday morning has he, Gunner, sat in the free -seats close 
to the squire's pew, wondering why the brave gentlemen and 
fair ladies on the brasses always crossed their arms like 
scissors, and held their heads askew ; why the mailed knights 
with tin pots (in marble) on their heads, always went to sleep 
with their feet resting on little dogs ; spelling out that quaint 
marble tablet, setting forth how Sir Roger Bielby died in the 
Civil Wars, and wondering what wars were like. Those 
Sunday mornings : how drowsy, how distressingly somnolent 
they were to him ! That weary litany ! that still more sleepy 
sermon ! There was a sharp zest or relish thrown in to 
relieve the monotony of the former in the shape of the pub- 
lication of marriage banns, and a neat peppery little prayer 
about the French and the Pope and a certain " blood-thirsty 
usurper," whose " casting down" was hebdomadally sup- 
plicated ; but no such zests enlivened the dreary waste of 
sermon. Page after page of manuscript was turned over 
with a lullaby of rustling foolscap, and the drooping, sleep- 
oppressed spirits' of the boys would have given in, have 



182 SUNDAY MORNING. 

knocked under entirely, were it not for the thought — the 
mighty thought — the bark riding on a sea of joy with twenty 
anchors of Hope at the bows — the thought of the gathering 
round about the baker's shop after church; the glad 
symposium of boys and girls with snowy napkins waiting 
for the baked dinners ; the gastronomic Bourse — where a 
rumour that Starling's pie was spoilt, that Bailey's over-cake 
of puff-paste rider to her pie had been devoured by a bucca- 
neering baker, was sufficient to throw a gloom on the market, 
and cause apples and marbles to be quoted at nothing at 
all. And, when the Sunday bakings did come forth, what 
glorious sights they were ! Gunner and Driver number seven, 
you have had commissariat beef, and commissariat biscuit, 
this Sunday morning ; but in those days you were entitled to 
a share in a dish in which there was brown, hot meat with 
streaky fat — a dish so brown, so streaked with white itself, 
so encompassed with savoury crispness that you fancied you 
could eat it, as well as the meat, for all it came from Stafford- 
shire and was but a potsherd. Nor was this all ; for in 
another compartment of this edible dish there lurked in a 
greasy nectar, potatoes — so crisp, so exquisitely done, so 
yellow, that they looked like the golden apples of the Hes- 
perides, or that the shepherd gave to Venus. Who would 
mind sermons with such fruits in store? Old days, those, 
Gunner and Driver number seven, quiet days, timid days ! 

Sunday morning at Doctor Tweep's Classical Seminary, 
Kilburn, Middlesex. Classical was Doctor Tweep's. There 
were talismanic " adsums" and " Meets " and "placets," used 
in playground, and class, and refectory. There was Smith 
major and Smith minor and Smith minimus ; and the boy who 
had charge of the birches, hang him ! was prcefectus. When 
we saw Dr. Tweep coming, we cried " Gave," — when he gave 
us permission to go " down street," on half-hours, he granted 
us an "exeat." Everybody was classical save the writing- 
master, who pretended to be, but wasn't ; and who, wishing 
to bestow a mark of approbation on one of his pupils one 
day, called him bonus puerus (thinking, good man, that what 
was sauce for the goose was sauce for the gander) and was 
then and there discharged by Dr. Tweep "for poisoning," as 
he elegantly expressed it, " the pure stream that flowed from 



SUNDAY MORNING. 183 

the Aoniart Mount." Select, also, was Doctor Tweep. At 
least we had room for forty, but only numbered twenty, which 
did not hinder our impartial preceptor dispensing among us 
the full allowance of flogging for two score. 

Sunday morning at Kilburn is marked in my recollection 
with three white stones. One stands for tea at breakfast, the 
next for letters from home, the third for Greek Testament. 
The tea was a great thing. We had milk and water during 
the week — " sky-blue," as we ironically called it — and bitter 
jokes we made about the chalk supposed to form one of its 
component parts, and the preposterous share the pump-handle 
had in its manufacture. But, on Sunday mornings we had 
tea, not in mugs, mind you, but in real cups, mind you. It 
was curious tea — somewhat resembling thin broth, not unlike 
very weak sago, with a smack of diluted colewort and a dash 
of camomile, and a pervading, sickly flavour, half saccharine, 
half " clothy," that gave it quite a relish. It was of a light 
liver colour, and had a thin marbled scum of skim milk 
a-top, and left a residue of thin leaves of a strange shape and 
colour, with a great quantity of short stiff stalks, that, when 
you swallowed any of them by accident, made you cough and 
sputter a great deal. Our head satirist and poet, who was 
thrashed about five times a week for inability to scan the 
humorous Virgilian line ending with " vox faucibus hcBsit," 
and who always got the quantities right in his sleep and 
forgot them when he woke — Mufnnhard he was called, — who, 
is now, I believe, a professed " fanny man " and diner-out, 
declared that these stalks were chopped birch-brooms. He 
ought to have known; for no boy had a more intimate 
acquaintance with the twigs of the tree of knowledge than 
he had. 

Letters from home were always delivered to us at this 
Sunday tea-time — open ; after having undergone an ocular 
quarantine at the hands and eyes of Doctor Tweep to secure, 
I imagine, their not containing unlawful playthings, fire-works, 
notions on education unsuited for our years, or " cribs " for 
our Latin exercises. If they conveyed serious intelligence, 
such as births, or deaths, or marriages, we got them without 
delay; but in ordinary cases we had to wait the Sunday 
morning delivery ; till which time, though we knew of their 



184 SUNDAY MORNING. 

arrival on the previous Monday, even, we were compelled to 
wait. Agonising suspense for those who were anxious to 
know how the pony was, or what Bob Burns had done with 
the last batch of puppies ; when the next plum-cake and silver 
crown were coming, and whether Mr. Park's stock contained 
any more " Red Rovers of the Ocean," for tinselling. 

Greek Testament also came on Sunday mornings, between 
breakfast and church times. Of all the gallons of tears I 
must have shed over the Hellenic language, the fewest, I 
think, the sparsest drops were poured forth over Testament. 
Digging up Greek roots as we did at other times, like pigs 
hunting for truffles, and scratching at the horny bark of the 
appalling tree of Greek verbs, till we felt inclined to hang 
ourselves on the branches, we went smilingly and joyfully to 
Testament. The master was an Oxford man, too poor to keep 
the necessary amount of terms, but hoping manfully to save a 
few pounds yet, and go back, and come out a Fellow. He 
had such a winning way, and easy power of explanation and 
illustration, and such a deep, rich, bass voice, that we used to 
sit with rapt ears and eager faces listening to him. And 
Tommy Brooks, from Smyrna, whose father was supposed to 
bea " dragon," an impossible profession, but was really, I 
opine, a " dragoman ; " Tommy Brooks — who used to stumble 
over en arche en o logos, as if the words were made of wood 
with rusty nails in them — grew so excellent a Greek scholar 
that at the half-yearly examination, being intrusted with the 
recitation of the ode of Anacreon, beginning " Thelo legem 
atreidas" he broke into such a flux of Attic, Ionic, and Doric 
intermingled, that they were obliged to stop him, thinking 
that he was in a fit. Moreover, it was in a comfortable little 
slice of a study in winter, and in the garden, a shady place, 
under laurel bushes in summer, where our class met. I would 
I were there again with Mr. Bidloe (drowned going out to the 
Cape) listening, " under the laurels," to the magnificent gospel 
of St. John. 

Sunday morning in London streets. The pavement seems 
to have its Sunday coat on, as the pavement treaders have. 
The omnibuses, though working, poor vehicles ! look spruce 
and " Sundayfied." The horses have bunches of ribbons in 
their ears, and the coachmen carry pinks or dog-roses in their 



SUNDAY MORNING. 185 

button-holes, or in their mouths. The drivers and conductors 
have some degree of smartness in their attire, not always, I 
am afraid to say, displaying clean linen ; but, always mounting 
— on the part of the driver — a pair of fresh gloves, and on 
that of the conductor an extra polish to his boots. The cab- 
men, unused to frequent fares on Sunday mornings, snore 
peacefully on their boxes, or improve their minds with the 
perusal of cheap periodicals ; or, seated on the iron door-step 
of their vehicles and puffing the calumet of peace, hold mystic 
converse with other cabmen, and with the waterman on the 
stand. 

Town-made little boys, with caps between Lancers' shakoes 
and accordions, pick out the cleanest spots on the road to cross, 
lest they should soil their bright highlows. Policemen lounge 
easily past, whistling softly, as if to say that, with the excep- 
tion of orange baskets, they war against no human thing to- 
day. Cooks and housemaids peep slyly over area railings and 
out of second-floor windows; for it is their " day out," and 
they are anxious to ascertain what the weather looks like, and 
whether it is within the limits of reason to risk and throw on 
the clemency of the skies that gorgeous thing I know of in the 
back-kitchen and a band-box — that boomerang which is to 
strike terror and dismay into the heart of " missus," and then 
recoiling, seat itself triumphantly on the head of Jane or Ann 
Elizabeth — the Sunday bonnet. But see, the door of this 
genteel residence opens, and forth from it comes Missus herself 
in her Sunday bonnet (with not half such splendid colours or 
so many ribbons as Jane's in the bandbox), and Master, and 
young Master, and Missey, and the children, all bound for 
church. Master has a broad-brimmed hat, and such a shirt- 
collar, neckcloth, and frill, as only the father of a family con- 
scious of his moral responsibility can boast. His boots are 
the boots of a man with five hundred a year, who owes his 
baker nothing, or, if anything, can pay it, sir, at Michaelmas 
when he sends his bill in. His double eye-glass has respecta- 
bility, paternity, morality in it. He is a Church man, I can 
see, by the complete Church service in a small portmanteau of 
blue leather, which young Master (bound in a cut-away coat, 
turned up with check trowsers, and gilt lettered) is carrying. 

Ring out, ye bells, from the great spire of Paul's ; from the 



186 SUNDAY MORNING. 

twin towers of St. Peter's, Westminster ; from lowly St. Mar- 
garet's, with its great stained window nestling close by. Ring 
out from St. Pogis-under-pump, where the rector is non-resi- 
dent, and the mild young curate has a hankering after candle- 
sticks on the communion-table. Ring out from the dozy 
chapel-of-ease, where the very crimson cushions seem to 
slumber ; from the bran-new Puseyite bazaar — I beg pardon, 
church — "where a wax-chandler's shop seems to have broken 
into the main avenue of Covent Garden market, and, having 
stormed the Pantheon in Oxford Street, to have sat itself 
down among the ruins ; tinkle from St. Hildeburga's, the sly 
little Romish chapel; — call your flocks together, Zoar and 
Enon, and Ebenezer, and Rabshekah ; — Howlers^ Jumpers, 
Moravians, Johanna Southcotonians, and New-Jerusalemites. 
Ring out, ye bells — for this is Sunday morning. 

And, ring out, oh bells, a peal of love, and kindness, and 
brotherhood. Ring Tolerance into preachers' mouths and 
men's hearts, that while they pray they may forbear to thank 
Heaven they are not as other men, or even as "this Publican," 
who is their neighbour ! 



SUNDAY OUT. 

It was, I suppose, a necessary consequence of my being a 
( desultory person, and writing always desultorily, that I had 
1 no sooner penned the prefix, Sunday, to this article than it fell 
i out that the current of my thoughts which are here set down 
I by my pen should run in the channel of Monday. My paper 
, was prepared, and my ink-bottle uncorked ; when stepping out 
, to purchase the newest of magnum bonum pens, I found my- 
self in the midst of a Monday morning's procession. A long 
I string of open carriages, broughams, chaise-carts, breaks, 
iand cabs, filled inside and outside with people dressed in 
: their best, and with unmistakeably holiday faces, immediately 
and naturally suggested races to me. But quickly remember- 
ing that the only two race-meetings that Londoners care to 
attend, Epsom and Ascot, were long since gone and past, the 
ship of my mind ran aground. Then, seeing sundry bright- 
coloured banners, and noting that the horses' heads were 
decorated with ribbons, I feebly thought of elections. 
But there was no gentleman in a white hat bowing right 
and left to the ragamuffins, and kissing his hand to the 
ladies at the windows, no drunkenness, do stone-throwing, no 
" Anybody for ever." So, recalling to mind, besides, that 
there was no metropolitan borough vacant just then, I aban- 
doned elections with a sigh. At length in the offing of my 
soul I saw a sail. The preponderance of ladies and smiling 
children's faces in the procession; the total-abstinence mottoes 
on the banners ; the general snugness, spruceness and jaunti- 
ness of the gentlemen ; the absence of red noses among the 
standard-bearers — all these said plainly that this was a 
teetotal procession. And it was. The mob, incarnated as far 
as my desire of knowing all about it went, by a pallid shoe- 
maker, informed me that it was " them teetotallers ; " and I 
left them to go on their way rejoicing to their commemora- 
tion, or revival, or centenary, or jubilee, or by whatever other 



188 SUNDAY OUT. 

name their cheerful honest festival might have been called : I 
left them I say to celebrate their white Monday ; regretting 
only that even virtue and good intentions were obliged to 
resort to the poor old aggressive paraphernalia of nags and 
ribbons, and bands of music and processions ; and that among 
the teams of well-fed horses there were to be found, in that 
perverse yoke-fellowship we won't abandon, sundry animals 
which divide the hoof and chew not the cud, animals with 
tusks, and ill-will grubbing snouts, of the porcine breed 
porky. Are we never to be able to do without banners ! 
Whether carried by crazy fanatics, scheming demagogues, 
bands of incendiaries, or Bands of Hope — are these pennons 
and streamers and braying wind instruments never to be dis- 
pensed with ! They are aggressive. They do irritate, annoy, 
stir up discord. They do say, " We are better than you; here 
is our nag to show it ; and if you don't come under this flag's 
shadow, we should like to know where you expect to go to." 
My friend the shoemaker, now, who would be all the better for 
being washed, and sober, and well shod (save that it seems a 
law of the sutorial being never to wear good shoes), and for 
going to a commemoration or a revival with health in his 
veins, money in his purse, and peace in his heart ; is evidently 
aggravated, nettled, exasperated, by all this flaunting and 
braying. You can't banner-wa^e and blow a man into tempe- 
rance and happiness. Which reflection causes me to go home 
as quickly as I can with the magnum bonum pen, and sit 
down to write about Sunday. 

I wish to state once for all, that I am treating this much- 
discussed Sunday question solely as one bearing on public 
morals, as conducive to public (mundane) happiness, and 
without the slightest reference to public religion. All the acts 
of parliament in the world will not make one man pious. I 
claim for myself and every other man a right of private 
judgment on this subject, and a wrong in being interfered with 
by any wholesale dealer in other people's consciences. You shall 
not fine me forty shillings for not going to church, by virtue of 
any Cap., Sec, or Sched. of any Act whatsoever. You shall 
not drive me to Doctor Mac Yelp's chapel with a moral rope's 
end, as boatswain's mates were wont to start men of war's-men 
when the church was rigged on the quarter-deck. 



SUNDAY OUT. 189 

Sunday in England must perforce be taken as a holiday, as 
we have scarcely any other holidays during the long year. 
The want of recognised days of public relaxation is the more 
lamentably apparent when we see the crowded bridges, steam- 
boats and tea-gardens, on any of those chance occasions set 
aside by authority as days of fasting and humiliation for war, 
or pestilence, or famine ; when we know that one great and 
awful anniversary in the Christian year — Good Friday — 
is the day on which railway companies advertise cheap excur- 
sion trips, and pigeon and sparrow-shooting matches come off 
at the " Red House," and the eleven of Nova Scotia meet the 
eleven of Little Britain upon the tented cricket-field. So few 
festivals have we, that the weary panting workers seize on the 
fasts to make festivity upon. 

Admitting, then, that Sunday is almost the only available 
holiday of regular occurrence, how, let me ask, should that 
holiday be spent ? I think I may best answer my own ques- 
tian, and hint what Sunday ought or ought not to be, if I 
describe it as it is. So, to paraphrase the good old penman 
who wrote the " Ecclesiasticalle Politie" " if for no other 
cause, yet for this, that posterity may know that we have not 
loosely, through silence, permitted things to pass away as in 
a dream, there shall be so much extant of the present state of 
Sunday among us, and their careful endeavours which would 
have amended the same." 

Sunday on the river — that shall be my theme this after- 
dinner-time, and Hungerford Pier my place of embarkation. 
Luckily for the holiday makers, and especially for those poor 
foreigners to whom a London Sunday is a day of wailing and 
gnashing of teeth, from the pervading outer dulness, the day 
is very fine. The vehicular movement is prodigious. Legs 
hang from the tops of omnibuses much thicker than leaves in 
Vallombrosa. Four-wheelers, out for the day, abound. Here 
it is the comfortable tradesman who has been drudging all 
the week selling his patented or registered merchandise ; 
inventing new Greek names for trowsers and shirt collars, or 
labouring in the throes of composition in the manufacture of 
novel advertisements for the daily papers; and who on Sunday 
orders, with becoming pride, the smooth-clipped pony to be 
put into the " conveyance," and drives Mrs. Co and the little 



190 SUNDAY OUT. 

Cos to Beulah Spa or Hampton Court. The tradesman's 
Sunday out is among the most comfortable of Sundays. It is 
something to see one's own shutters up, and note that they 
are cleaner and brighter than those of your neighbours. It 
is something to see the coats, boots, and hats you have turned 
out from your establishment displayed upon the persons of 
patented dandies : it is more to be nodded to familiarly by 
brother tradesmen, and to be patronisingly recognised by the 
patented dandies themselves — knowing that these dandies 
dare not cut you any more than they can sever the Gordian 
knots of red and blue lines that bind them to the debit side of 
your ledger at home. Superbly dressed is the comfortable 
tradesman, and in good taste too ; for, if his name be Stultz, his 
brother Hoby has probably made his boots ; and if he be 
Lincoln & Bennett, his neighbour Truentt has dressed his hair 
or trimmed his whiskers. Mrs. Co is gorgeous, and abso- 
lutely forgets the existence of the shop, not even condescend- 
ing to make use of the week-day compromise in which she 
speaks of her husband's place of business as the Warehouse 
or the Establishment. The little Cos who are enjoying their 
Sunday out from genteel boarding-schools in the neighbour- 
hood of Gower Street and the New Road, only wish Sunday 
were three times as long as it is. They like going to church 
with papa and mamma, dining at home, and driving to the 
Beulah Spa afterwards, much better than passing Sunday at 
Miss Gimp's establishment for young ladies (the name has 
been changed to Collegiate Seminary lately) — much better 
than morning service at Saint Somnus's Church, where the 
Litany is so long, so drearily long, for little ears to listen to, 
and where Doctor Snuffles coughs and mumbles so much 
during that tedious three-quarters of an hour's sermon, of 
which the young ladies are expected to give a compendious 
viva voce abridgment on their return to Miss Gimp's, their 
information on the subject consisting ordinarily of a confused 
mixture of notions that a text from the third chapter and the 
fourth verse was twice given forth from the pulpit: that there 
were a greater number of hard words on earth than there were 
previously dreamt of in their philosophy ; that a red cushion 
surmounted by a gentleman in a black gown and white bands 
quite equalled laudanum in somnolent properties ; and that it 



SUNDAY OUT. 191 

was unlawful for a man to marry his grandmother. Little 
Cos, growing" Cos, grown-up Cos who read this ! have rigidly- 
enforced, wrongly- apportioned Sunday duties never wearied 
you in a similar manner? Those long, droning, half-inaudible 
Sunday sermons; those long Sunday afternoons at home, when 
Scripture genealogies were to be read aloud, and all save good 
books (which to be good seemed imperatively required to be 
dreary, verbose, and unillumined by a ray of kindly interest) 
were prohibited; those Sunday evenings when smiles were 
looked upon as sinful, and people couldn't sit comfortably or 
talk comfortably because it was Sunday, and when at length, 
in sheer paroxysms of weariness, they tried to yawn themselves 
into sleepiness, and went to bed and couldn't sleep ; I ask 
you, members all of the Co family, have you no such remem- 
brances ? 

Tradesmen's " conveyances " form but one item among the 
multifarious throng of Sunday vehicles. Mr. Buff, the green- 
grocer, drives his Missus out in the spring cart which during 
the week has not been too proud to fetch the homely cabbage 
and the unpretending cauliflower from Covent Garden Market. 
Jif kins, the sporting publican, dashes along in a very knowing 
gig, drawn by a fast- trotting mare, which has been winning 
something considerable lately, and stands to win more. With 
Jifkins is his friend Skudder, the horse-dealer, and the two 
are bound to Barnet to look at a little oss that can do wonder- 
ful things, and is to be parted with for a mere song — a song 
with a good many verses though, I daresay. Young Timbs, 
and three other j^ouths, clerks — I beg pardon, civil servants 
of the crown — in the Irish Bog Reclamation Commission office, 
have hired a dog-cart for the day to drive down to Staines. 
Young Timbs will drive, but the horse is not a mild-tempered 
horse, and isn't at all comfortable about the mouth, and seems 
unaccountably disposed to go sideways and down areas. The 
little ragged Bohemian boys, who in their dirt and destitution 
stand out wofully against the well-dressed Sunday holiday 
makers, chaff Timbs sorely ; but he drives on manfully, and 
the horse is touched with repentance or whipped and jerked 
into good humour occasionally, and goes along for a hundred 
yards or so quite at a rattling pace. More fortunate in equine 
matters is Mr. Coupon, the stock-broker's clerk, who is having 



192 SUNDAY OUT. 

three half-crowns' worth of a monumental white horse, and 
manages him so gracefully that spectators turn round to look 
at him. Coupon is faultlessly dressed. His boot-heels are 
garnished with Maxwell's spur-boxes; he wears no straps, 
carries no whip — no instrument of correction save a short 
stick. He will ride into the park ; he will put the monu- 
mental horse into a canter ; he will draw up with the other 
horsemen and take off his hat when her Majesty passes. He 
will ride gravely past Mr. Decimus Burton's arch and down 
Piccadilly at dusk, majestically, as though he were accustomed 
to press the sides of a coal-black charger with buckskins and 
jack-boots — thoughtfully, as though there were dozens of red 
boxes filled with despatches in cipher awaiting his perusal, 
and two Cabinet-councils for him to attend to-morrow at the 
Foreign Office. Then he will take the monumental horse to 
the livery stable-keeper's in the back street and pay his three 
half-crowns, and will have been happy. 

The Sunday pedestrians I note are quite as remarkable in 
their way as the Sunday equestrians or riders in vehicles. 
The numbers of brightly-dressed people who throng the 
pavements is amazing. Shade of Sartor Resartus, where do all 
these coats come from ? These brilliant bonnets, these vari- 
egated silks, these rustling tarletans, these transparent bareges, 
these elaborately- worked shirt-fronts, these resplendent para- 
sols ? Can there be any misery or pauperism, or poverty in 
London ? Can any of these thousands of well-dressed people 
have debts, or executions in their houses, or be thinking of 
pawning their spoons ? The most wonderful thing is that 
you may wander for hours in the Sunday streets without 
meeting any one that you know. Nobody seems to go out 
on Sunday, yet everybody is out. Everybody seems to have 
wives, and families, or sweethearts, except yourself. And 
the boys, the marvellous, well-dressed boys ! They swagger 
along, four, five abreast. Their hair shines with pomatum ; 
they have cutaway coats, bran new, of bright brown, bright 
green, bright blue. They have meteoric waistcoats, and 
neckcloths like fiery comets. Their hats are of the newest, 
shiniest, silkiest. They have silver watches, walking-sticks 
with elaborate knobs. They all smoke. Everybody smokes. 
Smoke seems, with gay colours, to be a part of Sunday ; and 



SUNDAY OUT. 193 

now I can understand why the Manchester warehouses in 
St. Paul's Churchyard are so vast, and extend so far under 
ground ; and how it is that the excise duty on tobacco forms 
so considerable a branch of the revenue. Sunday out does it 
all. And the girls ! I don't mean the grown-up young 
ladies. We are favoured with the sight of those dear crea- 
tures, their ringlets, their ravishing toilettes, the sparkling 
little purses which they will persist in carrying in their hands, 
in a mistaken notion of security, and as persistently keep 
losing — on week days as well as Sundays ; but Sunday out 
daisifies the pavements with groups of girls of twelve and 
fourteen or thereabouts ; gaily attired girls, girls in plaited 
tails and sashes, and trousers with lace borders ; girls pro- 
foundly critical on each other's bonnets, and jealous of each 
other's parasols ; girls who hold lively conversations audible 
as you pass them, about what " Polly said to me, said she/' 
and how an appeal, en dernier ressort, had to be made to 
mother ; girls ordinarily seised of the custody of other little 
girls with little parasols, or of some punchy big-pated little 
boy, not much higher than the dogs which pass by and eye 
him wonderingly, — children who won't come along, and 
become tired, and desirous of being carried at unseasonable 
times, and sometimes break out into open rebellion and 
lachrymatory roars, rendering the employment of the para- 
sol handles as weapons of coercion occasionally necessary. 
Dear me ! what a deal all these young people have to talk 
about ! 

Slowly walking through the most crowded streets I can find 
towards the market oi Hungerford, I see many and think of 
more indications of Sunday in, as well as Sunday out. Sun- 
day in, stands ascetically at his parlour window, flattening his 
nose against the pane, and gazing at the merry crowd as 
Mr. Bunyan might have looked at the booths in Vanity Fair. 
Sunday in, contented but lazy, reposes behind his Venetian 
blinds, his legs on a chair, his hands folded, and a silk pocket- 
handkerchief thrown over his head to keep away the flies. 
Sunday in, convivial but solitary, has half- opened the window, 
and sits with his cold gin-and-water, and his newspaper before 
him, smoking his pipe, half- absorbed in the soothing clouds 
of the Virginian weed, half by a mental discussion as to the 

o 



194 SUNDAY OUT. 

expediency of turning out for a stroll in the cool of the after- 
noon. Sunday in, sits at the door of his little barber's shop, 
still "with his newspaper, and ready with his razor should any 
Sunday-outer, determined to be a dandy, but rather late in 
thinking about it, rush in to be shaved. Sunday in, who has 
been out on Saturday night, late and drunk, lounges out of 
his third-floor window, haggard, unshaven, and unbuttoned. 
Sunday in, and yet out, is perched on his little stool in the 
box entrance porch of the Adelphi theatre, taking the time of 
the passing omnibuses (in my youth I used to fancy that man 
was an artist, a government spy, a surveyor, a hermit, all sorts 
of things). There are Sunday ins in waiters yawning at the 
doors of hotels ; in stage-door keepers, eating their dinners 
from yellow basins in their key-hung, letter-garnished sanc- 
tuaries ; in clerks in west end banking-houses, keeping 
Sunday guard on Mammon in their rotation ; in omnibus- 
drivers and conductors ; in cab-drivers dozing on their boxes ; 
in hot stokers in their shirt-sleeves, perspiring in their melting 
engine-rooms in river steamboats ; in trimly-shaven inspectors 
doing day duty in station houses ; in barmaids and potboys at 
public-houses; in guards, drivers, stokers, clerks, porters in 
the great railway hierarchy ; in milk-women and fruit vendors, 
and servant-maids cleaning the plates after the Sunday's 
dinner, or sitting at the window of the kitchen area, writing 
those marvellously-spelt housemaids' letters, or sorting the 
contents of the never-failing work-box (it is against Sunday 
discipline to sew), or listening to the purring of that servants' 
best companion, and often only one, the cat. Oh, the shame, 
the wickedness, that the units should work, in order that the 
millions may make holiday ! But the sun, the trees, the 
birds, our hearts, our frames, all say, Rejoice and rest on 
Sunday ; and must we rest without rejoicing, or rest by 
putting ourselves on a treadmill of gloom ? If our brother 
does a little work to-day that we may rest ; is it so very 
dreadful, if we be just to him at another time ? One side 
must preponderate a little. When the balance shall be per- 
fectly equal, and the scale turns not in the substance or the 
division of the twentieth part of one poor scruple, nay, not in 
the estimation of a hair, then the Millennium will be come, 
and there will be an end of it all. 



SUNDAY OUT. 195 

Here is Hungerford Market. Choked. Red omnibuses, 
yellow omnibuses, blue omnibuses, green omnibuses, cast 
their crowded cargoes out into the arcade. Thousands of 
well-dressed legs arrive with their superincumbent bodies to 
swell the throng. .The tobacconist cannot serve twopenny 
cheroots and three-halfpenny cubas (more Sunday labour) fast 
enough. High o'er the crowd, like Roderick the Goth on his 
chariot, or Lars Porsena in his ivory chair, tower the big 
scarlet bodies, and big (though recently lessened) muff-caps 
of the British Grenadiers out for the day, twirling penny 
canes in their hands, giving their arms to diminutive females, 
or complacently seating little children upon their martial 
shoulders. 

Penetrating in that anomalous Hungerford Arcade, where 
on week-days lobsters and lithographs, prawns and picture 
frames, oysters and ginger-beer bottles, salmon and small 
tooth combs are mixed together in such heterogeneous confu- 
sion, I see a crowd, a-first-night-of-a-new-piece-crowd, a last- 
night-of-an-old-favourite -crowd, a Greenwich fair crowd, an 
examination-of-an-atrocious-murderer crowd, wedged together 
before a large double fronted shop. I elbow my way through 
this mob, which abroad would portend a revolution, or a pro- 
nunciamento against ministers at least, but which, on reaching 
the shop door, only portends in Hungerford Arcade Frigido's 
penny ices. Viva Frigido ! He (we will assume that he was 
a marquis with a villa upon a lake before the hated Austrians 
overran the fair plains of Lombardy) formerly made gauffres 
quite in a small way in a narrow stall in a back street some- 
where in the dubious regions between Soho and the Dials. 
We have watched Frigido narrowly for a long time. We 
never ate his gauffres, because we have no faith in the nutritive 
qualities of those unsubstantial framelets of pastry, and were 
apprehensive that the powdered sugar dispensed over them by 
means of a pepper castor, might possibly be gritty to the taste 
and stony to the stomach. But we watched him in his humble 
stall with a kindly interest. We watched him with his tiny 
furnace, and strange implements, and stores of gauffre batter : 
and when he started in the penny ice line we hailed the deli- 
cacy as a great idea — not an original one, perhaps. Those who 
have made pilgrimages in that part of the city of King Bomba, 

o 2 



196 SUNDAY OUT. 

known as Napoli senza Sole, will doubtless remember the 
itinerant vendors of gelati, and in even the better streets the 
Acquiaole, in their gay little wheeled temples, something be- 
tween Flemish pulpits and Chinese joss-houses, who sold iced 
drinks, iced fruits, iced water, for sums less by a despairing 
amount of fractions than the smallest copper token in circula- 
tion here. But to bring the ice — the lordly vanilla, the aristo- 
cratic strawberry, the delicate lemon — the speciality of Verrey's 
high-class saloons, the delicacy of routs and fashionable balls, 
within the compass of every Englishman who is the possessor 
of a penny : to enable the ice to be purchased for a " brown," 
and the lowly to call it, if they listed, a nice — this was in 
reality a philanthropic, a lofty, almost sublime achievement. 
Nobly has the end crowned the work. I find Frigido's 
counter besieged by ice-eaters, I find they eat one, two, 
three penny ices in succession, taking a vanilla as a whet, as 
one might take Chablis and oysters ; a strawberry as a piece de 
resistance ; and a lemon as a bonne bonche or hors d'ceuvre. I 
hope penny ices are not conducive to cholera. Frigido says 
no, and that on the contrary they are a preventive. Be it so. 
Give me a vanilla. So. Another, of another sort. Hum ! 
I find that there is a pervading flavour about Frigido's ices 
which I may describe as "spooney." They do certainly all 
taste of a spoon not silver, with a suspicion perhaps of tin can 
and damp cloth. But they are very cold and very sweet ; and the 
myriad consumers appear to relish them hugely. I find the 
boys and the girls dissipating quite in the Lucullus style upon 
penny ices. I find adolescents treating their sweethearts to 
vanilla. I find fathers of families dispensing strawberry ices 
to their children all round. I find a plaid tunic standing a 
lemon to a turn-down collar. I would rather see Scarlet Pro- 
boscis yonder, who looks contemptuously on at the scene, stand 
a penny ice to his friend Greybeard than two -penn'orth of gin. 
Frigido still pursues the gauffre trade in a remote corner ; but 
the snows of Mont Blanc seem rapidly gelidating the little crater 
of his Vesuvius. He has many assistants now, all Italians. 
Quickly do they spoon the ices out, quicker still do the coppers 
rattle into the till. I should not be surprised to see Frigido, 
about the year after next, driving a mail phaeton down Pall 
Mall. 



SUNDAY OUT. 197 

But I am bound for the steamboats and the river, and must 
no longer tarry in the Arcade among the penny ices. I pass 
along that railed-off portion of Hungerford Bridge which leads 
on to the steam-boat pier, followed and preceded by the same 
well-dressed crowds. I note as I pass a curious little announce- 
ment on the first bridge tower, setting forth that any one 
loitering on the bridge and so obstructing the pathway will be 
liable to a fine of five pounds and imprisonment. Surely this 
diminutive placard would have looked better on the Rialto, or 
the Bridge of Sighs, two hundred years ago, written in choice 
Italian, and signed by the dread Council of Ten. • What ! fine 
or imprison me, because I choose to lean over the bridge, and 
gaze on the blue dome of Paul's, or on the fretillating 
crowds below, or on the moon at night, without obstructing 
anybody's pathway ! Surely, now that we are sure of our 
great constitutional guarantees, our Habeas-corpus, our 
emancipation of everything and everybody, we are somewhat 
too easy to allow little petty tyrannies to clasp us in their crab- 
like embrace. But the steamboats are continually arriving 
and departing, and I hasten to the pier. 

To Chelsea, Battersea, Hammersmith, Richmond, and Kew. 
To London Bridge, Rotherhithe, Greenwich, and Gravesend. 
The little steamers, ant-hill like with human beings, hurry to 
and fro ceaselessly. They run in and out; they make a 
desperate disturbance in the uncomplaining water, splashing 
and puffing, and rumbling and choking, and getting better 
again, as if they were the most important steamers in the 
world. 

But small, lowly, and unromantic though they be, they 
bear on the broad bosom of the Thames peaceable, honest, 
industrious Humanity, in peaceful, honest, happy recreation. 
Who shall say (if we will speak our minds about it, and not 
be deterred by noisy petitioners of parliament, twenty signa- 
tures to a man) how many hearts' these little steamers lighten, 
how many frames they send reinvigorated to work to -morrow ; 
how much each of these noisy little boats does for peace and 
temperance, and the harmony of families, and the love of all 
mankind ! 



SUNDAY MUSIC. 



This earth, we live on is decidedly a very curious place, and 
people do the most extraordinary things upon it. " Whatever 
is, is right, !' of course — the number of feet in that line of the 
Essay on Man is certainly correct — but still I can't help 
doubting whether it be quite right to hate our brothers and 
sisters quite as much as we do. It can't be exactly a proper 
thing to take that which does not belong to us, and cut the 
throats of the legitimate proprietors, because they object to 
our proceedings ; to believe (or say we believe) that some 
hundred millions of our fellow creatures are bound head- 
long to perdition, because they believe rather more or less than 
we believe. It may be right, but it doesn't look like it, to 
send two honest labourers to hard labour in a villainous jail — 
to herd with Blueskin, Jack Rann, Bill Sykes, and Mat-o'-the 
Mint — for the microscopic crime of leaving haymaking to see 
a review ; it oughtn't to be right that a Christian priest, con- 
secrated to God's service for our soul's health, should, by 
virtue of his commission of J. P., have the right to .do a 
shameful and cruel wrong. Let me only take one little slender 
twig from one of the fascines with which we are perpetually 
fortifying our stronghold of assumed right or wrong — one 
splinter of the yule log of inconsistency — Music on Sundays. 

And, mind, I am tolerant, I am moderate; I am content to 
blink the general Sunday question — Sunday and bitters, or 
Sunday and sweetstuff. Meet me on this question : Is secular 
music on Sundays right or wrong, and are we inconsistent in 
our opinions and acts concerning it ? 

I maintain that music is always good ; and better on our 
best of days, Sunday. I shall not be long in finding antago- 
nists who will maintain that Sunday music is wrong, danger- 
ous, nay, damnable. 

Xow, why should secular Sunday music be so dreadfully 



SUNDAY MUSIC. 199 

wicked ? — or, again, admitting momentarily, that it might not 
be quite correct, why can't we be a little consistent in the 
application of our strictures, remembering that maxim so 
time-honoured (in the breach thereof), that what is sauce for 
the goose is (or should be) sauce for the gander likewise ? 
Did you never dwell, O ye denouncers of Sunday music ! in a 
provincial garrison town? Did you never listen without 
wringing of hands, or heaving of breasts, or upturning of 
eyes, or quivering accents — but, on the contrary, with much 
genial pleasure and content — to the notes of the regimental 
brass-band coming home with the regiment from church ? 
Was not that music of a notoriously worldly, not to say 
frivolous character, including marches, polkas, potpourris, 
schottisches, valses-a-deux-temps, many of which, by the self- 
same musicians, you heard performed only last night at the 
Shire Hall Ball, or the Dowager Lady Larkheel's Assembly ? 
And yet I never heard of an association in a country town for 
putting down regimental waltzes on Sundays ; and I decidedly 
never knew the poet's corner of a country newspaper to be 
ornamented by such a brimstone bard as he who empties his 
penny phials of penny wrath upon the wind instruments in 
Kensington Gardens. Tell me, are there not scores of water- 
ing places — pious watering-places, the chosen villegiature of 
serious old ladies with heavy balances at their bankers — of 
evangelical young ladies, whose lives are passed (and admir- 
ably, too) in a circle of tracts, good books, fleecy hosiery, beef 
tea, rheumatism, and bed-ridden old ladies — of awakened 
bankers, possessing private proprietary chapels, and never — 
oh, never ! — running away with the cash-box — watering-places 
where pet-parsons are as plentiful as pet lapdogs, and every 
quack, and every ignoramus, and every crack-brained enthu- 
siast can thump his tub and think it is a pulpit — can blow his 
puny tin trumpet and think it is the last trump ? Yet in 
these same watering-places I never heard of denunciations of 
the cavalry band, or very frequently the subscription band, 
charming the air with sweet sounds on Sunday afternoons, on 
the pier or the parade, the common or the downs. To come 
nearer home, who has not heard of the Sunday band playing 
upon the terrace of regal Windsor ? Was not that mundane 
music patronised by the most immaculate, severely-virtuous of 



200 SUNDAY MUSIC. 

kings — tlie pattern family-man, George the Third ! And who 
can err who copies George the Third ? And to come nearer, 
nearest home, see where yon palace stands — that unsightly 
hut expensive lump of architecture in eruption — that palace 
before which stand no unholy cabs 'oh. wicked Place du 
Carrousel that sufferest cabs, omnibuses, citadines, Dame 
Blanches, and ventures bourgeoises !' — in that palace the 
sovereign necessarily dines every Sunday when in town. Do 
you think Air. Anderson and the private band play psalm- 
tunes while the royal family are at dinner, indulge the royal 
ears with the Old Hundredth between the courses, and usher 
in the entries with the Evening Hymn ? Away, ye hypo- 
crites ! Go away, black men, don't you come a-nigh us. You 
object to Sunday strains when the music is out-door — when it 
affords a rational, cheerful, innocent amusement for the tens 
of thousands of overworked humanity. 

I do not consider myself to be altogether a heathen. I have 
no sympathy for Fetish rites, or for any form of Mumbo- 
Jumboisni, be that interesting ism found at Eldad, or Little 
Bethel, at Saint Trumpington's Cathedral, or on the west 
coast of Africa. I am not a pagan, a worshipper of Ahriman, 
a follower of Zoroaster, or a disciple of Tom Paine, yet I am 
constrained to confess, that I can discern no difference at all 
between sacred and secular music, that should render the 
performance of the first permissible, and of the second ob- 
noxious as impious on the Sabbath-day. Music may be grave 
or gay, lively or plaintive, but it is always sacred. It is an 
art. Its every phase can soften, refine, subdue, charm, re- 
fresh, console, humanise, elevate, improve. When it is coarse 
or vulgar, it is not music at all. but sound prostituted. So 
would I have no bad music allowed either on Sundays or 
week-days anywhere, but good music. What nice and con- 
ceited sciolist is to weigh the nice distinctions between the 
sacred and profane, — to tell me which is lay and which is 
clerical music ? The Dead March in Saul, played in quick 
measure, is a jig ; " Adeste Fideles '" is as triumphant, joyous, 
brilliant, mirthful, as the " Happy, Happy " duet in " Acis and 
Galatea." " My Mother bids me bind my Hair " is as plain- 
tive as any air in any oratorio in existence ; and so is " Auld 
Robin Gray." "Sound the Loud Timbrel " is in its actual time 



SUNDAY MUSIC. 201 

almost a polka. Who can call that tremendous deep burst of 
joy and praise — that chorus of choruses, the Hallelujah ; to 
which we, cold-blooded, fleshy, phlegmatic Englishmen even, 
accord the tribute of standing up uncovered whenever it is 
performed, — who can call the Hallelujah Chorus sacred in the 
Sternhold and Hopkins' sense of the word ? Sacred it is as 
the master-piece of a great musician, but it is no sour canticle, 
no nasal chant. It is a triumphant paean of happiness and 
thankfulness; it is the voice of all humanity, singing, not 
miserably, not dolefully, not with a mouth whose lips are 
cracked with vinegar, and whose tongue saturated with gall, 
and whose teeth on edge with bitter doctrine, and whose 
throat half-choked with a starched neck-cloth, but with full 
expansive lungs, with a heart beating with pleasure, with 
nerves strung with strong reliance and cheerful faith, with a 
whole spirit loudly, jubilantly giving thanks for the sun, the 
seas, the fields, the seed-time, and the harvest, for the merciful 
present and the merciful to come. Old Rowland Hill was 
right in his generation when he declared that he could not see 
why the devil should have all the good tunes to himself, and 
followed his declaration by having the words in his hymnbook 
set to the best secular tunes. But I will go farther than 
Rowland Hill. I cannot see why the devil should have 
any good tunes. Let us respect and cherish, ennoble and 
protect the art of music, and there shall speedily be no harm 
in music, secular or sacred, on Sundays. 

Sauce for the goose, sauce for the gander. In the name of 
common sense, if the Star steam-packet is allowed to start 
every Sunday morning for Gravesend with a brass-band on 
board, that plays gaily all the way to the suburban watering- 
place — if at Woolwich towards seven o'clock you may hear the 
Artillery band tuning up for the officers' mess, why should 
the crowds who now wander purposeless about the streets and 
parks of London be deprived of a cheap, wholesome, and 
sensible gratification ? Which is best — to listen to the over- 
ture to Oberon in Kensington Gardens, or to brood over a tap- 
room table, muttering out last week's news, or growling out 
the odds on the next Derby, or spelling out over a misanthropic 
pipe the record of the last prize-fight ? Which is best — to go 
to a Sunday bed in pure weariness, or skulk about street 



202 SUNDAY MUSIC. 

comers and against posts till the public-houses open, and 
gnash your teeth with impotent abuse of the legislature when 
they close, or maunder over a pamphlet on raw cotton in a 
deserted club-room — or to saunter on the green grass beneath 
the green trees, surrounded by happy groups, gay colours, 
kind voices, silver laughter, children spangling the sward like 
daisies, manhood in its prime, beauty in its flower, old age in 
reverent complacency — all kept together, not by strong excite- 
ment, not by frenzied declamation, not by fireworks or jug- 
glers' feats or quacks' orations, but by the simple, tender tie 
of a few musical chords, of a pretty tune or two played by a 
score of men in red coats ? We might have the grass and 
the trees, the children and the daisies, you say, without the 
music. If we need recreation, we might walk in the fields or 
the lanes. Yes ; and I have seen a cow in a field, and she 
was chewing the cud, and a donkey in a bye-lane, and he was 
munching thistles. If I wish to ruminate, to be alone, to be 
Misanthropos and hate mankind, I know where to walk ; but 
if I wish to see my fellows around me pleasurably occupied 
(for what is happiness but delightful labour, and doing good 
actions the most delightful labour of all !), and by some harm- 
less music pleased, and thereby rendering the best and sweetest 
thanks to that Giver whom (as good Bishop Taylor phrases 
it) we cannot please unless we be infinitely pleased ourselves — 
then thither will I go ; and thither, too, I went only two 
Sundays ago,* f into Kensington Gardens, where 60,000 per- 
sons (and not one pickpocket — apparent, at least), of every 
rank and grade in life, were collected to hear the band play. 
I forgive Sir Benjamin Hall much red tape, past, present, 
and to come, for this one sensible concession of his. 

The band playing in Kensington Gardens ! Till within the 
last month, this celebration taking place during the summer 
months twice a-week was, with some few exceptions, an 
exclusively aristocratic amusement. Some ragged waifs and 
strays of bad or miserable humanity — some heaps of tatters 
that had souls inside, but very little corporeal life — were wont 
to come here and crouch upon the grass till routed up by park- 
keeper's cane, dully listening to the music, and wistfully 
gazing round from time to time in search of eleemosynary 

* This paper was written in September 1855. 



SUNDAY MUSIC. 203 

I pence. But they seldom managed to elude the vigilance of 
- 1 the guardians even sufficiently to pass the gate. By times 
i threadbare men who did not eat often, pacing the noble 
. avenues in abstract thought or entranced perusal of learned 
1 books, would come, accidentally, upon the aristocratic throng ; 
: but they would glance at their shabby clothes and sigh, and 
hie away quickly on the other side, frightened like unto a 
• fawn leaping out from a covert into some glade of Bushy 
Park, where a merry pic-nic party is assembled, and betaking 
i itself, startled, into the umbrage of the oaks again. People 
i dressed to attend the band-playing at Kensington. Lines of 
I empty carriages waited outside the gates, while their pos- 
sessors promenaded the gardens. Round the braying bands- 
men were gathered the great London dandies, the great 
London belles, the pearls of aristocratic purity, and, I am 
afraid, some other pearls of beauty and of price, but of more 
Cleopatrean configuration, and whose Antonies found here a 
neutral ground whereon to vaunt their charms and their pos- 
session. Could the wiry little terrier in the sulky brougham 
by Victoria Gate have spoken, he would have told you where 
the lady in the long black ringlets, with so many diamonds, 
and with gold flowers on her veil, was gone. The coachman 
could speak, but would not — he was discreet. The whole 
scene was a charmed circle of moustaches and tufts (the beard 
movement was not then), watchchains, filagree card-cases, 
Brussels lace, moire antique dresses, primrose kid gloves, vinai- 
grettes, auburn curls, semi-transparent bonnets, varnished 
boots, and bouquet-de-millefleurs. As for smoking, who would 
have dared to think of smoking in Kensington's sacred garden, 
save, perhaps, wicked Captain Roister of the Heavies, or the 
abandoned Lieutenant Lilliecrap of the Lancers ? They 
smoked — those incorrigible young men — but then it was at 
some distance from the ladies (whose points and paces, by the 
way, they discussed not quite so respectfully, but with some- 
thing of a sporting gusto) ; and there is a very difference, 
you will allow, between a penny Pickwick and one of Hudson's 
regalias at two and a half guineas per pound. 

Miraculously to say, the swells (so unaffectedly may I be 
allowed to term the upper classes) remain. They positively, 
by a charming condescension and inexplicable affability, 



204 SUNDAY MUSIC. 






frequent the band-playing", now that it takes place on Sun- 
days ; and considering the lateness of the season, in no 
diminished numbers. But to this inner ring of perfumed 
youths and jewelled dames, to these sons of proconsuls, and 
daughters of praetors, and wives of sediles, there is now added 
another belt — thicker, stronger, coarser, if you will (like a 
" keeper " to a ring of virgin gold) — a belt of workers, of 
peasants, mechanics, artisans, clerks, high middle-class, 
medium middle -class, and low middle-class men, who come 
here, Sunday after Sunday, rejoicing at, and grateful for, the 
boon (infinitesimally small as it is), who bring their wives 
and children, down to the youngest, with them ; who listen 
patiently and cheerfully to the music, and, wonder of wonders, 
do not endeavour to stone the musicians, root up the plants, 
set fire to the grass, dash out the brains of the children of the 
aristocracy against stones, rend the swells limb from limb, sell 
the daughters of the praetors into slavery, defile the graves of 
the aediles' wives, smoke short pipes in the vicinity of the 
band, fight among themselves, usurp the chairs by force, and 
refuse to pay for them, carve their names on the trunks of 
the trees, gather flowers from the Birclibroomicus Busbiense, 
introduced 1640 (as the label says), pelt the attendants of the 
refreshment-rooms with ginger-beer bottles, or purloin Mr. 
Gunter's cheese-cakes and raspberry tarts ! Who do none of 
these things, though certain sections of thinkers and speakers, 
even of a moderate description, appear to think that every 
Sunday crowd must necessarily commit acts of this nature. 

My Sunday afternoon in Kensington Gardens was not, 
perhaps, begun under the most advantageous circumstances. 
Though the day was hot, it was lowering, and the sky seemed 
to say, Put on your white ducks and book-muslins, and leave 
your umbrellas at home, but in half- an-h our I rain. Again, 
I entered the gardens by a wrong gate (there are so many 
gates), and wandered about for some time disconsolately, 
finding myself at Bayswater when I wished myself at Knights- 
bridge, and catching a glimpse of the hideous Wellington 
statue at Hyde Park Corner through the trees, when the next 
vista I expected was the red bricks of William the Third's 
tasteless but comfortable palace. Then I came across two 
children whom I didn't love, as I do most children, but 



SUNDAY MUSIC. 205 

1 looked upon, on the contrary, with, an evil eye, and malevolent 
" aspirations, for they were horrible children ; they squabbled 
one with the other, and threatened to tell of one another. 
; One of them ran between my legs, and another cut me across 
1 the ancles with a whip — playfully, as he meant it, no doubt, 
! fiendishly as I thought. They were aided and abetted in all 
• this by a morose nurse, who looked darkly at me, and won- 
dered, mutteririgly "What people thought of themselves." I 
confess, as far as I was concerned, that I thought it unjust 
i that people should be tripped up and cut across the ancles. 
' Then I was sorely annoyed by a stern and forbidding man, 
! who persisted in walking before me, who had no right to 
wear the boots he did — they being aggressive, iron-heeled, 
and craunching the gravel as he walked. He carried an 
umbrella as though it were a cartwhip ; and I could not help 
fancying that his name must have been something like 
Captain Prosser, formerly R.N., that he had been governor of 
some jail, and that he was a hard man fond of the crank. 
Altogether I became uneasy and dissatisfied ; was almost con- 
cluding that my dinner had disagreed with me. 

But I came upon the music-platform at last, the Guards' 
band standing in a circle and blowing manfully, the adjacent 
refreshment-room, the chairs, the price of which had been 
! judiciously reduced from sixpence to one penny, and sur- 
i rounding all, a compact, earnest, eager crowd,* listening 
with pleased ears to the music. The fine gentlemen, the 
beautiful ladies, the titled and happy of the land, were there in 
great force : their empty carriages waited for them at the gate 
as in the old time ; but the immense mass of those present were 
toilers — working-people of every rank ; nor is it necessary to 
draw any minute distinction between them, for the bank- 
clerk, the curate, the tradesman, have to work quite as hard, 
and find it quite as difficult to make both ends meet, as the 
carpenter, the bricklayer, and the journeyman tailor. I do 
not think I am called upon to descant at length upon the 
good behaviour, the quiet inoffensiveness of the vast assem- 
blage here collected ; upon the absence of broils or violence, 
or ribald talk. I am one of those who think that an English 

The total number of persons who entered Kensington Gardens on Sunday, 
August 19, 1855, was 61,458. 



206 SUNDAY MUSIC. 

crowd is the best behaved, quietest, best humoured crowd in 
Europe. I think so still, though among those thousands in 
Kensington Gardens, at least a tithe form part of that ominous 
well-dressed throng whom not many Sundays back, I had 
heard yelling at the same noble and happy personages they 
associated so comfortably with to-day; whom I had seen 
lashed to fren2y by the pig-headed exhibition of a mis- 
directed police force, and which fren2y, but for the oil thrown 
a few days afterwards upon the waves, would have grown 
into a tempest such as not all the trails of all the six- 
pounders in Woolwich Arsenal, served by all the young 
gentlemen who have not the least business to be in the House 
of Commons, would have been able to quell. 

The same crowd — the same Toms, and Dicks, and Harries ; 
and see what a little is required to keep them in good 
humour. A circular refreshment room, with ices, ginger- 
beer, and Banbury cakes ; some scores of garden chairs at a 
cheaper rate than usual, and a platform where my friends the 
red-jackets are operating upon ophicleide, trombone, and 
kettle-drum, and this was all. I even remarked that the 
tunes the musicians played were of the dreariest, most lachry- 
mose, most penitential tunes that could be well heard, — still 
secular music no doubt, — selections from popular operas, of 
course, but so long-winded and melancholy, that I could not 
help fancying that the band-master himself was one of the 
principal objectors to Sunday music, and had made a com- 
promise with his conscience by providing the most mournful 
pieces in the regimental repertory. A patient public — a 
placable monster — a good-natured rabble, this same English 
nation. Here they seemed quite satisfied, pleased, nay, 
grateful, for the Life Guards' band, with their " Tunes that 
the Cow died of." They asked not (at least audibly) for 
more than this, with the permission of walking about under 
trees, and of seeing their children sporting on the grass. Yet 
but two Sundays before I had seen another public, far away 
beyond the Straits of Dover, — a patient public, too : good- 
natured, long-suffering, but not always quite contented. For 
that public were provided, as special Sunday treats, military 
bands, not one or two, but half-a-dozen ; a whole concert of 
drums ; miles of picture galleries, and museums, and antiqui- 



SUNDAY MUSIC. 207 



fl ties, and palatial saloons, to walk about in, free; and a Great 
J Palace* full of marvels of art and industry, for which the 
i whole world had been ransacked, to be explored for four sous 
] — twopence ! 

On the whole, I should like our Sunday to be quiet, 

, cheerful, English, with a little more out-of-doorishness, — a 

. little more harmony — there, I have said it ! — a little more 

sitting down at tables, or strolling about grassy swards to 

hear good music. Don't stop short at Kensington Gardens. 

. good Mr. Chief Commissioner. Don't stop short at the band 

i of the Life Guards. Remember there are such places as 

i Hyde Park, Saint James's, the Green, Victoria, and Battersea 

Parks. One volunteer is worth a dozen pressed men. Let 

the soldiers have their afternoon holiday if they choose one, 

or let them have extra pay if that is what they desire. "We 

won't object to the rate. But let us have bands of our own 

in our public gardens to discourse sweet music to us on Sunday 

afternoons and Sunday evenings. There will be far more 

brotherly love, and far less liquor, and far fewer night-charges 

on Monday. 

A little before six o'clock the musicians played " Partant 
pour la Syrie " and " God save the Queen ;" then the crowd 
dispersed quietly. I saw not one policeman, and not one 
policeman was needed. The wheezy, red-waistcoated park- 
keepers were quite sufficient to quell the somewhat too 
exuberant animal spirits of the London boys, who are to 
be found in every London crowd, making noises where they 
ought to be silent, and clambering over railings where they 
have no business to be. Walking home, much elevated in 
spirits from the cheerful scene I had witnessed, and quite 
forgetting Captain Prosser and his boots, and the disagree- 
able children, I thought to myself, This is not much, but it is 
some relief for the toiling many. 

* The Great Industrial Exhibition in Paris, in 1855. 



SUNDAY TEA-GARDENS. 



I hate been over, in my time (and it lias not been so 
extended a one, either) a good many " works." Works for 
making gas, and cotton sheetings, and lump sugar, and ladies' 
bonnet ribbons, and gutta percha tubing, and biscuits for the 
use of Her Majesty's navy. I have seen innumerable jennies, 
cranks, chucks (eccentric and otherwise), lathes, screws, and 
endless straps. I have heard, at the Polytechnic and the 
Panopticon, learned professors explain multifarious varieties of 
machinery in motion and have come away — I am ashamed to 
confess it — not much wiser for the explanation. Yet I have 
learnt one thing, although the extent of my mechanical know- 
ledge is very limited. Wherever I have seen machinery in 
motion; wherever there was a snorting, jarring, oscillating, 
whizzing, buzzing, screaming, groaning, whistling noise of 
wheels and levers, cranks and piston-rods, I have always 
remarked a very strong, warm, oleaginous smell, varying 
between that of a cookshop and a tallow-manufactory. I have 
learnt that this fatty odour arises from the grease with which 
the machinery is lubricated, and that the wheels, the cranks, the 
whole machine, cannot go on comfortably or safely at all, 
without this unctuous relief. I suppose it is the same with 
the axle-boxes of the railway carriages which swallow up the 
yellow compound administered to them by railway-porters so 
greedily ; I suppose it is the same with the I-don't-know-how- 
many-horse -power engines on board Waterman Number Four, 
which cry out for grease so continually, and make the engineer 
so shiny in appearance and powerful in smell ; I suppose it is 
the same with the obstinate lock of my parlour door, which in 
its rebellious rustiness sets up its tumblers to every ward of 
every key in the picklock's huge bunch, until one drop of oil 
being gently insinuated into its cavities on the feathered end 



of a 



SUNDAY TEA-GARDENS. 209 



a goose-quill, it yields to the magical power of grease in a 
moment, and becomes as easy as a glove immediately. 

This human machine, which goes on the whole with so 
much regularity, and turns out 130 large a quantity of work, 
material and intellectual, with such satisfaction to society, 
requires a little oiling, too, sometimes. That cunning engi- 
neer, Nature, has of herself provided a natural spontaneous 
oil for the lubrication of the joints of the body, else would the 
muscles grow rigid and the sinews crack. But the joints of 
the mind, do not they require unction occasionally ? Is that 
machinery which works in cellular tissues, and beneath mucous 
membranes, and in a network of so many thousand exquisitely 
delicate meshes so easily broken, so hardly repaired, in no 
need of relief? Is the brain not in some danger of growing 
rusty, and out of order, of stopping altogether for lack of oil, 
or, through ceaseless and intolerable friction, of going (which 
is worse) to all sorts of blazes of discontent, hatred, and angry 
madness, if a drop of oil on a goose feather be not tenderly, 
administered now and then ? When that huge three-decker 
was launched the other day, unnumbered pounds of tallow were 
employed to grease her false keel and the ways down which 
she slid. Else would she have stuck in the slip till this day, 
and forty thousand dogshores might have been knocked away 
in vain. The ship of life will stick in the mud too, if a little 
unction be not judiciously administered to get her off. 

The elders of this nation, until very lately, would not seem 
to have had much faith in the efficacy of any lubricant for the 
well-going of the machine public. They barely acknowledge, 
even now, that lubrication may be a good thing : leaving the 
public to supply its own agent (if it can) according to its own 
imaginations. Thus one citizen has mixed his lubricant with 
scented bear's grease, another with brandy and water, another 
with raw gin, a fourth with vinegar, a fifth with gall and 
wormwood. Another, and a far more numerous class, who 
cannot always help or choose for themselves, and do require a 
little help sometimes, have taken any unctuous agent that came 
to hand just as they could get it, and have got on as well as 
they could — running off the road and coming into dangerous 
collision now and then, to the great astonishment and indig- 
nation of the aforesaid elders. 



210 SUNDAY TEA-GARDENS. 

The few can grease their wheels any day in the week, and 
all day long, if they like. The many have only the one day, 
Sunday, and but a few hours of that, to clean off the accumu- 
lating rust which the social wheels will gather from se'nnight 
to se'nnight. I have already cursorily traced some of the 
street features of a Sunday out. Let me devote these present 
lines to Sunday on the river and in the tea-gardens. 

"Waterman" Number One Hundred, in which I start from 
Hungerford Pier, is very full. So crowded is it when we 
start, that I should be inclined to give a flat contradiction to 
anybody who told me it could possibly hold any more ; yet we 
seem to take in and find room for a few dozen more at every 
pier. We are (and I am delighted to see it) a mixed assembly : 
swells of the most solemn description quite barricaded from 
the vulgar view by- all-round collars, and elevated above 
meaner mortals by the highest of heeled boots, being in close 
proximity to horny-handed mechanics and their families. 
Soldiers, working young fellows and their sweethearts, and 
boys, who have been clubbing among themselves for cheroots, 
and half-pint bottles of stout, together with that stimulating 
viand, the Abernethy biscuit, and who are bent on seeing life. 
I am pleased to observe, too, that a very large proportion of 
the passengers have provided themselves with copies of the 
cheap periodicals sold on the steamboat piers. I am not dis- 
posed, seeing them read, to be quite so critical as to the 
character of the literature they are reading, as a newspaper 
commissioner, or Cardinal Wiseman. I am afraid there is but 
little about St. Alphonso Liguori, or Dr. Lardner on the 
S team-Engine, or Anonymous on the measurement of the 
Parabola, in these publications. I see a good niany humorous 
woodcuts, and observe sundry grins of the broadest description 
pervading the countenances of the purchasers as they read. 
This is bad. It is better though, or so it appears to me, that 
they should be studying a nonsensical broadsheet of fun, with 
one hundred comic cut's for one penny, or even that they should 
be absorbed by the last police-case, or elopement in high life, 
than they should be beguiling their passage down the river by 
shouting scurrilities to the passengers by other boats. The 
Sunday travellers had no better amusement than that, in the 
polished days of Mr. Ned Ward. People were given to it even 



SUNDAY TEA-GARDENS. 211 

in the soberer days when it pleased Doctor Johnson to take a 
pair of sculls at the Temple Stairs with Mr. Boswell. 

We paddle down the river in the golden evening. The very- 
smoke of London turns crimson in honour of the Sunday sun, 
and wraps round the blue dome of the master church like a 
king's mantle. The white shirt-sleeves of the rowers that 
shoot past us ; the thousand and one masts in the pool, dressed 
out with Sunday flags ; the thronged Gravesend boats, full of 
light bonnets and summer muslins ; the tuneful' bands ; the 
dancing, rippling, sparkling water, looking as though it would 
never have the heart to drown a man — all these make my soul 
merry within me, and give great glory to Grease. More than 
this, I have picked up a genial companion on board. " Comes 
jucundus in via pro veJiiculo est." A merry travelling com- 
panion is as good as a coach, says old Tully, and my travelling 
friend is indeed the representative of a coach — I have seen 
him upon a coach often, I fancy ; a long coach, painted black, 
with much velvet and fringe upon it, drawn by long- tailed, 
long-maned horses, also black ; and on the roof of which, my 
friend with some half-dozen others sit with their legs swinging, 
and holding on by the ornamented pegs to which the black 
ostrich plumes are affixed. He has those plumes in a bag 
beside him now, on board ""Waterman" One Hundred; and, 
having a red nose, a rusty black suit, a frayed white neckcloth, 
and a most humorous countenance, is — of course — an under- 
taker's man. I like him much, though that never -failing 
odour of mingled mouldiness and recently consumed spirits 
which distinguishes his profession, pervades him. He is full 
of humour, shrewd observation, caustic comment, and good- 
natured satire. He takes the cheeriest view of things mun- 
dane. I should like him to bury me. — Bump ! 

This last ejaculation, I humbly beg to observe, does not in 
the least relate to the mirthful philosophy of the man who 
does black work. It is " Waterman " Number One Hundred 
that bumps, not the undertaker. I had observed for a con- 
siderable time that our gallant craft was moving through the 
water rather slowly, and made very little way, and that we 
were on this side of the Tunnel Pier, when we ought to have 
been at Blackwall. I had, in my carelessness, and desire to 
impute the best motives to everybody, almost assumed that 



212 SUNDAY TEA-GARDENS. 

the Waterman's captain desired to give us the best possible 
view of the river prospect, and therefore steamed along 
gently; but the bump scatters that theory to the winds. Have 
we run aground ? Have we sprung a leak ? Are we to go 
down as when Kempenfeldt's sword was in the sheath, when 
his fingers held the pen, the " Royal George" went down 
with twice four hundred men ? An immediate rush is made 
forward, and a counter-rush aft. The engine begins to give 
forth strange noises, and to emit steam from strange places. 
The ladies begin to scream and threaten fainting ; and a con- 
siderable section vehemently express their wish and determi- 
nation to "get out," which, there being no boat near, is 
ridiculous. There is " something the matter " with the 
engines. I think there is something the matter with the 
engineer, whose greasy trunk, accumbent between the deck 
and the engine-room skylight, is now visible, and who looks 
wrathfully, and, I am afraid, a little rumfully, at the captain. 
The call-boy has disappeared. Has he mutinied ? Is he 
traitor ? Can he have deserted his post ? The captain seems 
puzzled. He sweeps the horizon with his eagle glance, but 
the glance comes back as if it were not at all satisfied with 
the excursion. He looks down at the engineer's wrathful 
trunk, and into the coaly engine-room, as if this last were the 
crater of Mount Vesuvius, and he didn't know what to make 
of him. A gentleman on board (who had turned a little pale 
at the bump, and assured his lady companion rather tremu- 
lously, that there was no danger), wishing to be facetious 
under difficulties, asks the captain " what his little game 
is ? " to which the commander answers, like an oracle of 
Delphos, " to get to Woolwich as fast as he can;" but, 
oracle-like, does not explain how he intends to accomplish the 
feat. A great many people have gathered amidships, and 
are examining the engines with that fixed, absorbed vacuity 
of curiosity with which people look at the moon, or a fallen 
cabhorse, or an omnibus with the wheel off, or a gentleman 
having his boots cleaned by one of the brigade. Several 
people say "it's a shame," and the juvenile portion of the 
passengers generally vote the accident " a lark; " one gloomy 
man (there is always one person at least in every public con- 
veyance whose name is Misanthropos, and who hates all the 



SUNDAY TEA-GARDENS. 213 

world) prophesies fatal consequences, and audibly expresses 
his conviction that the directors of the company are liable to 
be indicted for manslaughter, and that the stoker is drunk ; 
one individual in a light brown paletot, publicly gives out his 
determination to write to the Times, and probably retiring 
within himself to concoct that epistle, mentally, is thenceforth 
dumb. Meanwhile, the steamer continues motionless. After 
a great deal of hammering and rumbling, and a colloquy 
between the captain and the engineer, which is rather more 
personal than pleasant, the paddle-wheels make a feeble revo- 
lution or two, and then stop again. Worse than this, the 
anchor won't hold the ground, and we drift miserably into 
the middle of the stream, like a log as we are, passed by 
crowded steamboats that laugh at our disaster, and heavy 
sluggish lighters and hay -barges, whose fantailed-hatted com- 
manders openly deride us. I am not going to stand this any 
longer. A wherry approaches. I jump in it; and if the 
officers of the company want to collect the sky-blue ticket 
which is available for this day only, and from the pier from 
which it is issued, they must come and fetch it. Thus I 
leave " Waterman " Number One Hundred to her fate. 1 
should have liked to take the man who does black work with 
me, but he sticks to the ship — probably with an eye to busi- 
ness. Off goes the wherry, and whether the " Waterman" 
steamer went to Woolwich, or Wales, or the World's end that 
day, I don't know. 

Of all havens on the shores of the earth I am landed 
at Rotherhithe. I do not object to paying the somewhat 
exorbitant fare which my conductor demands of me, because 
he grounds his extortion upon the very logical position that 
" steamers don't break down every day." Happily, they 
don't. But, I think when I have advanced a few hundred 
paces inland, that I might just as well have been set ashore 
on Juan Fernandez, or on the inhospitable shores of Pata- 
gonia, as at Rotherhithe. It is dreadfully barbarous. I 
know the Commercial Docks must be close by, for I wander 
over bridges and among locks, and am beset by yards of ships 
at every step. But I can find no houses, no edifices save 
ropeyard H and sailyard X ; I can see nothing in the distance 
but windmills, tall chimneys, and more masts of ships. I 



214 SUNDAY TEA-GARDENS. 

know that Deptford and Greenwich must be some two or 
three miles further on, but I can find no one to put me in the 
direct road thereto. I meet four men in fur caps and red 
flannel shirts. I ask them ; but the spokesman (if he indeed 
could be called a spokesman who spoke not) answers with a 
guttural grunt, like a benighted Dutchman as he is, and 
walks away. I ask an educational man, in black, with a 
white neckcloth, but he, pulling a dial from his poke (like 
the philosopher in As You Like It, that Jaques met), tells me 
very wisely that it is half-past six o'clock, and that Shiloh 
Chapel is close by. I come at last to a dreary canal, a most 
melancholy artificial estuary, like a river that has seen the 
vanity of the world's ways, and has determined to live by 
line and rule in future. Here I meet a little boy in corduroy 
who looks intelligent. I ask him the nearest way to 
Greenwich. He stares at me, scratches his head, and calls 
"Tom!" 

Tom, a little bigger and in fustian, comes up, and saying, 
feebly, " Rotherhithe," runs away as hard as ever his legs 
can carry him. So, at last, finding nobody to tell me the way 
to Greenwich, I am fain to find it out myself. Knowing that 
it must be down the river, somewhere, I keep close to the 
river, and keep on walking stoutly : not making much way, 
but hopeful of getting to my journey's end eventually. 

If I am nearly an hour walking to Deptford, and an ho 
more walking to Greenwich, my journey is amply repaid by the 
discoveries I make. I fall upon a whole river-side, full of tea 
gardens. Perhaps, with more propriety they might be called 
bottled-beer-gardens, cold-rum-and-water-gardens, tobacco- 
pipe-gardens : but tea, bread and butter, and shrimps, prevail 
to a great extent, notwithstanding. Oozy meadows run down 
to the river's bank ; sedgy little summer-houses hang over 
the brink ; and in some instances the house itself overlooks 
the water : and its balconies, perched high and dry above the 
tide, its windows, its very roof, are crowded with Sunday faces. 
Here you may see the public wheels greased in the most 
primitive fashion ; for, the aristocracy does not frequent these 
Sunday tea-gardens ; the wealthy tradesman scarcely knows 
of their existence ; the most elevated personages who are 
aware of them are the licensing magistrates. Here come, 



he 
sa- 



SUNDAY TEA-GARDENS. 215 

emphatically, the public ; the working, toiling, patient, legis- 
latively-silent, public ; hither they bring the wives of their 
bosoms, and the children of their hopes and poverty ; and 
though Heaven knows the air from the Isle of Dogs is not the 
balmiest or most odoriferous in the world — though the gar- 
dens and summer-houses are of the shabbiest and darkest — 
here they sit in the summer evenings, and smoke, drink, and 
enjoy themselves. 

Yes. They will smoke the strongest of tobacco ; they will 
call for a pot of mild ale, and a seedy biscuit ; Mrs. Opus will 
quench her thirst, and the boys will take a drink, and even 
young two years old will have a sup, and John Opus, the 
bread-winner, will take a mighty pull. And it is my firm 
belief that if all the palace gardens, parks, picture-galleries, 
museums, conservatories, and aviaries, in all England, were 
to be opened on Sunday from morn till dusk directly, as 
soon as the public had sensibly enjoyed a sufficient quantity of 
art-instruction, and was approaching within sight of the 
distant confines of art-botheration, John Opus, the working 
man, would say to Rebecca his wife, "Now, Becky, I just feel 
comfortable for a pipe and a glass of ale, and I am sure you 
must be thirsty, so come along." And they will go and par- 
take of these unlawful things ; and I am sorry that the world 
is so depraved : but lubrication there must be, or things you 
little dream of will take fire from over-friction — and though 
you lay on the genuine Pharisee paint an inch thick, to this 
complexion you must come. 



SECOND-HAND SOVEREIGNS. 






Has ever any one, or is any one supposed ever to have 
gone over the whole of the museums of the Louvre ? I know 
there are people who will tell me that they have done it. 
The sort of tourists who "do " the Rubens' s at Antwerp in 
half a day; who scamper through the Vatican as though 
they were running a race ; who dot down the castles on either 
side of the Rhine in their note-books, like dry-goods' clerks 
checking off entries of pepper and raisins ; who work through 
the sights of Paris, in Galignani's Guide, as the Englishman 
did through the dishes in the carte at the restaurant, beginning 
with the soups and ending with the cheeses and salads : these 
are the sort of people who will confidently assert that they 
have inspected the Louvre in its entirety. Go to, I say. 
Nobody can have accomplished the feat. M. de Nieuwenkerke, 
the Director- General of the Louvre, may know something of 
the museums, but he is not omniscient. The guardians in 
the cocked hats who sell the catalogues, and who yawn 
piteously during the long hours — as well they may ; for 
Salvator Rosa becomes a drug in the mental market at 
last ; Raffaelle a bore ; Gerard Dow intrusive, and the 
treasures of art toujours perdrix — know little or nothing be- 
yond the departments immediately confided to their care. As 
to the flying tourists : they may say that they have been here, 
there, and everywhere, and that they have seen — the whole 
concern ; but I don't believe them. I know how Mrs. Cruggs 
from Manchester goes up the wrong staircase and loses her 
way ; how Splattertrees the great connoisseur gets jammed up 
in a dark corner, among the artists' easels and platforms ; how 
Pry wanders into a guard-room by mistake, and is dreadfully 
afraid of being bayonetted for his intrusion ; and how Miss 
Cleverboots is continually making short cuts, and as continually 
coming back to the room she started from, until at last she sits 



SECOND-HAND SOVEREIGNS. 217 

down on a crimson velvet ottoman in the salon carte, and cries. 
As for the valets de place and cicerones from the hotels, they 
are all humbugs; from Paris to Peru, from Venice to the 
Valhalla, they are equally unworthy of confidence, and tell you 
that you have seen everything, when in reality you have seen 
comparatively nothing. 

Yesterday I found myself in a museum which, although 
you may or may not have seen it twenty times, I succeeded in 
persuading myself was entirely novel, and might have been 
specially added to the Louvre as a testimonial of gratitude for 
my visit to Paris at this inclement season of the year. This 
was the Musee des Souvehahsts, the Museum of the Parapher- 
nalia of the Kings and Emperors of France ; and, forgive 
me if I am irreverent, a palatial Monmouth Street or Holywell 
Street for the display of second-hand sovereigns. 

Kings are but men, I know. The sword, the sceptre and 
the sway — the crown, the chrism and the orb, will not save 
them from headaches, if they drink too much wine ; from corns, 
if they persist in wearing tight boots ; from death, when their 
time comes. Yet a king — be he a mere drivelling idiot, pass- 
ing his leisure in making pasteboard coaches ; a mischievous 
lunatic, or a tipsy beer and tobacco reveller — fills, under any 
circumstance, so conspicuous a place on the world's stage — is, 
right or wrong, so talked about, written about, sung about, 
painted about, during his lifetime — that some degree of interest 
attaches itself at last, perforce, even to the clothes he wore, 
the knives he ate with, and the chairs he sat upon. Respect 
for the individual is not indispensable for the entertainment of 
curiosity respecting him. A king is but a man ; but, the old 
clothes of a king are surely more interesting than those of a 
cadger ; and this is why the museum of second-hand sovereigns 
in the Louvre is full of interest and instruction for me, and 
why I have chosen it as a text for this paper. 

Here is a room of noble proportions. The floors of polished 
oak, the walls of crimson damask, thickly sewn with golden 
bees ; the ceiling sumptuously carved and gilded, and rainbow- 
tinted with paintings by the first artists in France. Lofty 
glass-cases with curtains of crimson silk line this room. These 
cases hold the old clothes of Napoleon the Great. 

See, here is the famous redingote gris — the gray great ccat, 



218 SECOND-HAND SOVEREIGNS. 

made familiar to us by a thousand pictures and a thousand 
songs. I don't think, intrinsically, it would fetch more than 
half a dozen shillings. I am afraid Mr. Moses Hart of Holy- 
well Street would not be disposed to give even that amount for 
it ; yet here it is beyond price and purchase. It has held the 
body of the man whose name is blazoned on the ceiling ; whose 
initial, pregnant with will and power, N, is on wall and 
escutcheon, on casque and morion, on vase and cup, on key- 
stone and pediment, on coin and ring, on spoon and fork, on 
the step of the altar, the judge's bench, the footstool of the 
throne, everywhere in this land. This common coat of coarse 
gray duffel hangs in the midst of velvet and silk, gold and 
silver embroidery, stern, calm and impassible, and throws all 
their theatrical glories into shadow ; even as the man who 
wore the coat made all the Idngs and emperors and princes 
that were his tools, his slaves, or his victims, look like common 
people beside him, as he sat in his box at the theatre at Erfurt, 
throning it over a pitful of kings, or causing the blood of a 
chamberlain of the Holy Roman Empire to run cold within 
him by beginning a story with " When I was a lieutenant in 
the regiment of Lafere." 

I would the Emperor's boots were here — those notable jack- 
boots which RafTet and Charlet knew so well how to draw ; 
the boots which, muddy, dusty, worn, ruined, frown at you, 
moodily and despairingly, in Paul Delaroche's picture of Na- 
poleon at Fontainebleau. People talk of the Emperor's cocked 
hat ; but, the boots are far more characteristic of the Man. 
Curiously they are associated with him in some of the most 
momentous phases of his career. The boot was pierced by a 
bullet at Bellinzona, and there Napoleon received his almost 
only wound. For the want of boots — he had no money indeed 
to buy them — Napoleon Bonaparte could not go to the Indies. 
If those boots could have then been obtained — bought, borrowed 
from Talma, wheedled from an unsuspecting tradesman — there 
would probably have been no Eighteenth Brumaire, no Empire 
of France, no Kingdom of Italy, no Russian Campaign, no 
Austrian marriage, no Spanish ulcer, no Moscow, no Waterloo, 
no St. Helena. But, not even with St. Helena ended the boots 
of Bonaparte. Twenty years after his death, when his grave 
under the willows was opened, and his coffin unscrewed that 



SECOND-HAND SOVEREIGNS. 219 

his person might be verified by the King of France's son who 
was come to take it home, the most note-worthy appearances in 
the bier (after the features of that face which the fingers of 
death had not been able entirely to efface, nor the grave to 
vanquish) were the boots. The Museum of Second-hand 
Sovereigns is incomplete without the encasements of those 
feet of Hercules. 

The boots indeed are wanting, but the secondhand clothes of 
Napoleon are here, — ranged all of a row, more like Monmouth 
Street, or the theatrical warehouse in Vinegar Yard, than ever 
are some half-dozen pairs of white satin shoes, profusely em- 
broidered with gold, crumpled, creased, and (to tell the truth) 
remarkably grubby, not to say dirty. The Colossus had small 
feet, and the shoes might belong to a woman. And could he, 
the iron man, have worn these gewgaws, that might have 
danced upon a rope, or pirouetted on the opera boards, or 
patted over the polished flooring of the Petites Maisons, but 
hardly could have belonged to him who crossed the Bridge of 
Lodi, and trod down empires and trampled upon dynasties ? 
He could, he did wear them. These were his coronation shoes, 
— the shoes of the Concordat, the Champ de Mai, the night 
divorce from Josephine, and the marriage with Maria Louisa ! 
He wore those gloves, too, that hang above. They are of 
■white leather, embroidered, but large and clumsy-looking; 
for, the Colossus had large hands (though soft, white, and 
dimpled, like those of a girl), as became the grasper of thrones, 
the seizor of Italy, who put the Iron Crown on his own head, 
crying " Guai a chi la tocca /" — Woe to him who touches it. 
He wore those dainty pink silk stockings with the golden clocks ; 
he wore that 'broidered white satin tunic, that would so admir- 
ably have become Madame Vestris in one of Mr. Planche's bur- 
lesques; he wore that voluminous crimson velvet mantle which is 
pinned out in a circle against the wall ; and — laugh not, sneer 
not, but wonder ! — he wore those half-dozen court coats and 
continuations in velvet and satin, with big cuffs, straight collars, 
and square skirts. The conqueror of Europe in the spangled 
court suit of the Marquis de Carabas ! Yea, and with a gilt 
sword,like a dancing master's, — yea, and with a brocaded waist- 
coat, with low flaps and peaked pockets ! If the old clothes 
were not there to bear me out, you would think that I lied. 



220 SECOND-HAND SOVEREIGNS. 

This was his, too — a very different coat ; a sombre, faded, 
long-tailed, double-breasted, high-collared, purple-blue coat, 
embroidered on collar and cuff and down the seams with olive 
leaves in dead gold. That is the coat of a general of the 
Republic. It is the coat of Marengo. 

Black, rusted, devoid of splendour, ludicrous almost, there 
are three second-hand sovereignties here, perhaps the most 
interesting and significant in the Museum. These are three 
hats. Two of them are of the species known as cocked, and 
were worn by the Emperor in his campaigns ; but they are 
singularly unlike the petit chapeau.* These two hats are 
cumbrous, top-heavy, lopsided, exaggerated monstrosities. The 
resemblance between one and that affected by the British 
beadle is painfully exact ; the other might have been worn by 
glorious John Reeve as Marmaduke Magog in the "Wreck 
Ashore," or by the ghost of a fiddler in that famous old 
Vauxhall orchestra that had a sounding-board like a cockle- 
shell. Yet these were hats of power ; hats that, defined 
against the white smoke of the battle, gave hope to the 
faltering, encouragement to the brave ; one sight of which, 
one approving nod, made the mutilated grenadier forget his 
wounds — took half the sting away from death. Each was a 
guiding-star to glory, plunder, victory ; and — ah me i — how 
many hundred times was each cocked hat an ignis fatuus, 
decoying men to a bloody, unremembered grave ! 

Hat number three is of a different order altogether. It is 
not cocked, three-cornered, flapped, slouched, peaked, or broad- 
brimmed. It is not a fantail hat, a coach- wheel hat, a wide- 
awake, a Jim Crow, a brigand, a William Tell, a Hecker, a 
Tom and Jerry, a waggoner's, a Tom Tug, a sou- wester, a 
four-and-ninepenny gossamer, a Paris velvet-nap, a shovel 
hat, a sombrero, a straw hat, or an ordinary chimney-pot 
" tile." It is simply a " shocking bad hat," — the shockingest 
perhaps that ever was seen by human eyes or worn by human 
head ; a round hat with a short crown and a narrow brim, 
made perhaps of felt, perhaps of rabbit's- skin, — certainly of 
a dingy, rusty material, utterly seedy, poverty-stricken, and 
woe-begone in appearance. Napoleon the Great — he of the 

* The veritable "petit chapeau " is among the relics in the Emperor's tomb 
at the Invalides. 



SECOND-HAND SOVEREIGNS. 221 

white satin shoes and velvet robe — wore this miserable old 
hat, this shameful tatterdemalion fragment, that no Jew would 
bid a sou for. He wore it, where ? At Longwood, St. 
Helena. 

If any comment were valuable (and no comment is) on the 
futility of human ambition, the emptiness of human gran- 
deur, it might surely be found in this old hat. It is the hat 
of a bankrupt. Not that the man was penniless. He had 
enough money, even in his stern captivity, to have purchased 
a score of hats, with lace and ribbons enough on them to 
serve my ]ord the sweep on May-day ; but it is the moral, not 
the material ruin that stares you in the face in this shabby 
head-covering. The hat says, " Broke." 

Underneath this hat is a little yellow iron-moulded cambric 
pocket-handkerchief, that was taken off Napoleon's bed after 
his death. The relic should soften us. It is all over now. 
Outlaw, emperor, adventurer, general, prisoner — they exist no 
more ! They are all blended into the handful of ashes in the 
Invalides, " on the banks of the Seine, among the French 
people, whom he loved so well." 

The sceptre, sword-belt, coronation-sword, and sash of 
Napoleon ; a chess-board and chess-men presented to him by 

I his sister, Caroline Murat, Queen of Naples ; several sets of 
saddles, bridles, and housings, of Oriental workmanship, 

! blazing with gold and embroidery, presented to him during 

i the campaign of Egypt ; a crown of olives, modelled in pure 
gold, placed on his coffin as an offering from some city, whose 

i name I forget, on the occasion of his second funeral ; a 
splendidly-bound copy of Ossian's Poems, illustrated with 
original drawings by Isabey, after Giraud ; a copy of the Code 
Napoleon, engrossed on vellum ; a manuscript record of the 
coronation, with costly coloured drawings ; these are yet 
among the relics of the Empire, exhibited in these glass cases. 
Within a railing in a corner is the Emperor's camp-bed. 
Emperors' camp-beds do not interest me much. There is 
something " Bullfroggish " in that imitative austerity which 
the great ones of the earth affect in their sleeping accommo- 
dation. The hard pallet of Charles the Fifth at Yuste ; the 
divided bed of Louis Philippe, one half of which was a 
knotty palliasse, and the other half, in delicate attention to 



222 SECOND-HAND SOVEREIGNS. 

his queen, a feather bed; this severe, uncompromising bed of the 
French Csesar ; even our own Great Duke's spare mattrass and 
simple iron bedstead; are not to my mind any very convincing 
proofs of their owners' abstemiousness and hardihood. Hard 
beds are not conducive to early rising ; nor are they neces- 
sarily productive of self-denial. One of the laziest men I 
ever knew used an iron bedstead fit for a Trappist, where he 
lay on straw, like Margery Daw. Napoleon could have slept 
anywhere. In a chair, as at Austerlitz; in his bath, as at 
St. Helena ; on horseback ; in his box at the opera ; in his 
carriage; standing, even. He wanted sleep so little, and 
used a bed so seldom, that he might as well have had no bed. 
Still, if a bed were necessary to his camp equipage, and as 
part of his state and appanage, he might surely have had a 
bedstead with a little carving and gilding, with some velvet 
and golden bees, some eagles and N's about it; however hard 
the mattrass or low the pillow might have been. I may be 
wrong, but there is affectation and sham humility about this 
shabby camp-bed. It seems to say, boastingly, " See what a 
philosopher I am ; see how I despise the pomps and vanities 
of the world. Not only will I have a portable bed (which 
simply would be reasonable) ; but it shall be of the ugliest 
form and the clumsiest material. I am a grander monarque 
than Louis Quatorze ; yet see how I can dispense with that 
solemn old mountebank's gigantic four-poster, with its dais 
of three stages, its carvings and gildings, its plumed capitals 
and silken cords. Yet I am as grand upon this workhouse- 
looking pallet, as though I slept in the Great Bed of Ware." 
But, what could the contemner of the fripperies of luxury 
want with silver-gilt boot-hooks and a golden stewpan ? For, 
here, proudly displayed upon a field of crimson velvet, are all 
the articles forming the Emperor's travelling equipage. Be- 
sides the boot-hook and the saucepan we have here knives, 
forks, plates, tea and coffee-pots, corkscrews, penknives, 
scissors, spoons, bodkins and toothpicks — all in the precious 
metals. Here, too, are the numerous requisites for the 
toilette : razors, lathering brushes, shaving pots, and scent- 
bottles : — ay, my lord, scent-bottles — one, religiously pre- 
served by General Bertrand (I think), has some of the scent 
used by tne Emperor yet remaining in it. Napoleon scented ! 



SECOND-HAND SOVEREIGNS. 223 

The conqueror of Europe perfumed like a milliner, or that 
certain lord that Harry Hotspur saw! Csesar with a golden 
stewpan ! 

The writing-table or secretaire of the Man, which stands 
hard by, with a worn leathern arm-chair, looks far more 
business-like and consistent. It is as plain as plain can be — 
indeed I have the very counterpart of it — up, goodness and 
the waiter only know how many pair of stairs, in the Quartier 
Latin in the City of Paris. But, it is only in form that the 
two articles of furniture resemble one another. For the 
Emperor's writing-table bears, oh ! such unmistakeable signs 
of hard work, indomitable perseverance, and iron will ! It is 
splashed in innumerable places with ink; it has been punched 
with penknives and scorched with hot sealing-wax. The 
leathern covering of the top is frayed with the contact of 
papers and elbows; it has been worn into holes by the 
drumming of anxious fingers. Perhaps this table is the 
most suggestively eloquent of all the relics in this strange room. 
Truly, the hat covered the head, the sword begirt the side ; 
on that bed Napoleon slept, on that saddle sat, with that 
diadem crowned, with that scent perfumed, himself. But, on 
that table lay, hundreds of times, the paper on to which 
flowed by the duct of the pen the mighty current of the 
Emperor's thoughts. He must have sat at this table crown- 
ing and uncrowning kings in his mind, crushing up dynasties 
with a phrase, devoting thousands of men to death by a word. 
This table with the leathern top was an unconscious Atlas, 
and held up a world of thought. What may not have been 
written there ! The draught of the Milan decree, the virtual 
death-warrant of the Duke d'Enghien; suggestions, pregnant 
with sense and will, to the subtle lawyers who were drawing 
up the Code ; bulletins of victory and defeat, proclamations, 
short notes of playful affection in the early days to Josephine 
— later, to another bride. At this table may have been 
signed the decree for the fundamental reorganisation of the 
Theatre Francais, which decree — vanity ! — emanated from the 
Kremlin at Moscow. At this table may have been signed the 
last abdication, which — vanity of vanities ! — was done in an 
hotel in the Faubourg Saint Honore. Were not the table 
dumb, it could tell how often Napoleon had sat at it, radiant 



224 SECOND-HAND SOVEREIGNS. 

with joy, trembling with anxiety, frowning with anger, white 
with despair. How the imprecation was muttered, the air 
hummed between the teeth, the pen anxiously gnawed, the 
devil's tattoo beaten with the fingers, the vain word or mean- 
ingless caricature scrawled on the blotting-paper ; how the 
sigh stole forth, or the brow contracted, or the smile lighted 
up sheet and table like a sun, as the phrase was weighed, the 
word sought for, the thought summoned. Only this table 
could tell us whether the uncouth, misshapen, almost illegible 
scrawl, which Napoleon wrote, was really his natural hand- 
writing : or whether, as some, and not of his enemies, assert, 
it was designedly simulated in order to conceal the faultiness 
of his orthography. 

One other little bed invites us. It is very small, very deli- 
cate, very daintily festooned with lace, and glows with gilding 
and shines with green satin. It is the first bed of a very 
little child, born to greatness — the cradle of the King of Rome. 
The poor baby did not need it long. He did not die, but 
lived his evanescent kingdom out, and sank into that little 
white cloth jacket and pantaloons with sugar-loaf buttons 
(painfully like the uniform of my friend Mrs. Biffins' s foot- 
page, Chawks), of the Austrian Duke de Reichstadt. Done 
up in that mournful flannel-like little skeleton suit, he played 
about the dreary rooms of Schonbrunn, to be taught to be 
called Herzog von Reichstadt, and to forget that his name was 
Napoleon ; to think of his father as something very like an 
ogre ; and to believe perforce that Grandpapa Francis, the 
little wizened old man in the white coat and pigtail, was the 
incarnation of all that was good and wise and powerful in 
the world. It must have been cruelly hard upon the little 
Herzog. I don't think he could have succeeded in forgetting 
or believing it all. He must have looked now and then upon 
the House of Hapsburg as a mouldy, tumble-down old man- 
sion, haunted by ghosts in white flannel. Ah ! how shudder- 
ingly his thoughts must have reverted sometimes from the 
solemn ladies of honour, and pudding-headed chamberlains of 
Schonbrunn, with their guttural talk, to that gay palace far 
away, where there were so many mirrors and golden eagles — 
to mamma, who had such fair hair, such blue eyes, so many 
diamonds — to papa, who walked about the room so much, 



SECOND-HAND SOVEREIGNS. 225 

with hands behind his back, and talked in snch a loud voice 
to the gentleman who sat at the table writing ; who would 
take the little boy up and dandle him, and gaze at him with 
so much pride and joy from those wondrous eyes. Ah ! A 
dreary little second-hand sovereign was the king-duke, done 
up in white flannel to forget that he was himself. The very 
cradle in which the child slept was destined to have a second- 
hand fate. It was used in 1822 for the posthumous son of 
the Duke de Berri, the Duke de Bordeaux, Comte de Cham- 
bord, Henry the Fifth — what you will : a lamentable instance 
of second-hand sovereignty again. 

Going round and round about this room of relics, as I do, 
speculating — " mooning" would perhaps be the proper word 
— upon all the precious relics exposed in the glass cases, I 
become so imbued with the Idees Napoleoniennes — so saturated 
with notions of the Empire — that I have a difficulty in per- 
suading myself that I am not now living in the year '10. I 
fancy myself in the lumber-room of the palace ; and when I 
hear a pair of boots creaking in an adjoining apartment, can 
hardly help expecting the advent of Duroc, or Bertrand, or 
Rapp, asking me que (Liable I am doing there ? And when 
from the lofty windows I look into the court-yard below, the 
delusion of the Empire still clings to me ; for there I see on 
parade the Imperial Guard — yes, bearskins, gaiters, eagles on 
the cartouch-boxes, crossbelts, long moustaches, and all. They 
are on guard ; they are alive ; they walk and talk and smoke 
in the guard-room ; I see them with my corporeal eyes. With 
these below, with those around, with the Tuileries' dome sur- 
mounted by the tricolor in the distance, there wants to com- 
plete the picture but this — a roll of the drums, a sharp rattle 
as arms are presented, and then, cantering into the square 
upon a white horse, a little man with a cocked hat and a grey 
great coat. 

There are many more chambers in this Museum, devoted 
to other second-hand sovereigns — the legitimate sovereigns, 
indeed, of France. Here in a room, decorated, in contradis- 
tinction to the Napoleon Museum — all in blue, sewn with 
golden lilies — are the paraphernalia used at the coronations of 
Louis the Sixteenth, and Charles the Tenth; the crown of the 
Duke d'Angouleme, as Dauphin (wonderfully like the tinselled 

Q 



226 SECOND-HAND SOVEREIGNS. 

diadem with wliicli, in our school-days, we were wont to deco- 
rate the effigy — penny plain and two-pence coloured — of Mr. 
Denvil as the Fire King) ; the sword, sceptre, and hand of 
justice of Charlemagne ; the sedan-chair of King Artaxomenes 
— I beg pardon, of King Louis the Fifteenth, otherwise called 
the Well-beloved, otherwise known as the proprietor of the 
Pare aux Cerfs : that admirable educational institution, sup- 
ported by the involuntary contributions of the French people ; 
a little black kid shoe worn by Marie Antoinette (poor thing!), 
so tiny, so delicate ; a little cannon, with ivory horses, pre- 
sented to Louis the Sixteenth as a child; an arbaleste, or 
cross-bow, of Marie de Medicis ; and an exquisitely beautiful 
mirror of Venice glass, with a framework of mosaic in precious 
stones, presented to the same royal lady by the Venetian 
Eepublic ; Bibles, missals, and books of hours, belonging to 
various sovereigns ; swords, cross-bows, maces, habergeons, 
and pistols ; and numerous suits of splendidly-wrought armour, 
among which is one suit of immense size and height, reputed 
to have belonged to, and to have been worn by, that king 
whose portrait by Titian is in the Grand Gallery of this same 
Louvre, — the king who loved so well to " amuse" himself, 
and was so delighted at having saved his "honour" at the 
battle of Pavia, but who was not quite so careful of the 
honour of the female subjects whom he betrayed, — the king 
who, first the rival, was afterwards so great a friend (until he 
fell out with him again) of our Henry the Eighth, and had 
that famous junketting with him upon the Field of the Cloth 
of Gold — King Francis the First. He might have been able 
to wear this suit of armour (which would about fit Mr. Hales, 
the Norfolk giant), but he was assuredly a consummate rascal. 
Of course, being so, he is one of the most popular of the 
French second-hand sovereigns, — almost as popular as our 
merry scoundrel, Second of that line, and our bluff bigamist, 
Eighth of that ilk, are with us. 

These, and many more shreds and patches of second-hand 
royalty, are to be found in that Musee des Souverains of the 
Louvre which the reader may or may not have seen. In either 
case, I would advise said reader to visit it whenever he or she 
comes to Paris. It may be somewhat consoling to a man 
whose state is low, to find that even sovereigns — even the 



SECOND-HAND SOVEREIGNS. 227 

Holy Alliance — even the allied potentates — are subject to the 
indignity of having their old clothes hung up to show ; and 
that the coronation mantle dangles from, a peg, in the long 
run, even as the masquerade domino, the cast-off uniform, or 
the threadbare great-coat. Mr. Carlyle might come hither, 
and find — not a new philosophy, but fresh materials for its 
application. And I think some sovereigns — yea, even some 
of the potentates whose august names are to be found in the 
Ainianach de Gotha of this present year — might come here 
too, and, going, might leave behind them some second-hand 
ideas, some second-hand prejudices, some second-hand rascal- 
ities, some second-hand tomfooleries, which might be advan- 
tageously hung on pegs beside the second-hand sovereignties 
of a few centuries back. 



q2 



TIME AND THE HOUR 



There are few persons, I believe, belonging to what I 
may call the middle class of society who have not, at some 
period of their lives, been seised or possessed of a cylindrical 
metal box, containing a spring of bluish hue, and a certain 
number of wheels cogged, or otherwise, called a watch. At 
this present moment of writing, I have such a cylindrical box 
— such a watch. It is not by any means a handsome watch. 
It is not jewelled in any of its holes, neither has it a lever, 
or escapement, or horizontal movement, but simply an old- 
fashioned adjustment of the " verge " principle. Nor does 
its old-fashionedness give it value. It is old, but I suspect 
worthless, as an old hat, or an old pair of boots, or an old 
umbrella. It is not a little enamelled bijou of a thing to 
nestle in a lady's bracelet, or garnished with a fairy key, and 
some elfin chatelaine of "charms to lie in a white velvety 
hand." It has no second hand — no engraved dial, no view 
of the Bay of Naples, or true lover's knot in diamonds or 
rubies on its outer lid. It does not strike chimes, or play 
opera tunes. It is a watch — a hideous, turnip-shaped affair, 
with a tallow face, begrimed with fat mis-shapen letters, and 
with a huge keyhole in its countenance like a bleary eye. 
Its hour hand is crooked and tarnished, its minute hand is 
shorn of three parts of its proper length. A friend of mine, 
to whom I once offered it for sale, called it, less reverently 
than emphatically, a "duffer; " and I doubt, were I to offer 
to raffle it, that I could secure a subscription of a dozen 
members at even sixpence a head — even on the signature of 
a preliminary treaty that the winner was to spend convivially 
half its value, and the " putter-up " the other half. It goes, 
sometimes, after a great deal of winding up, and ticks with a 
harsh, creaking, discordant noise. But it soon grows sluggish 
and morose — its hands moving, I am inclined to think, rather 



TIME AND THE HOUR. 229 

backwards than forwards, and requiring to be shaken violently, 
or banged sharply against a hard surface, or kept in a very 
hot room to prevent its stopping. Such is my watch with a 
battered old case, which I please myself sometimes to consider 
silver, but into whose real composition I am nervous of 
inquiring, lest it should turn out to be old iron, or lacquered 
copper, or rusted pinchbeck, or some other marine store. 
Yet, seedy and feeble, and superannuated as it is — it sticks 
to me, this time-piece. 

Watches of greater value and more precious materials, 
together with chains, pins, rings, and other articles of 
jewellery, I have found to inherit a marvellous property of 
departing from me ; they take unto themselves wings and fly 
away, without giving me the slightest notice, leaving me only 
memorials — souvenirs in the shape of frayed button-holes, and 
punctured stocks, and rusty morocco cases — memorials as 
melancholily tantalising as a used-up cheque book, or a 
champagne bill that has been paid. This watch won't go : 
through fair and foul weather, through good and evil report, 
it adheres to me. "We clomb the hill thegither;" and 
perhaps it will sleep with me at the foot thereof, when I go to 
the land where John Anderson my Jo, and many, many more 
Johns and Jo's have gone before me. 

The "duffer" is useless for time-keeping purposes, that is 
certain : I can't sell it ; I can't wear it in my waistcoat 
pocket, for fear of being asked the time and not being able 
to be up thereto ; thus risking ridicule and shame. I won't 
give it away, or hitch it out of the window, or liquefy it in a 
frying pan, a la man-o'war's-man. Suppose that I philosophise 
upon it — that I view it, " duffer" as it is, in its relations to 
time and the hour — to human energies and failures and suc- 
cesses — to the march of intellect and the life of man. 

To speak of Time — the venerable figure not incommoded 
with drapery, with forelock, scythe, and hour glass (the sands 
for ever running), with wings, and foot for ever poised upon 
the march. " Tempus fugit." I will be bold at once and 
dissent from, the wise old saw. Time does not fly. He has 
no wings, no poised foot, no power of locomotion. Time is, 
and was, andVill be, the same — unchanged, unchangeable. 
Don't make of Time an ogre, pitilessly devouring his children . 



230 TIME AND THE HOUR. 

as the Virgil and Homer men would make you believe he 
does. Take him as lie is ; calm, tranquil, unmoved by the 
course of years, centuries, and ages. Take him as a decent, 
sober citizen, sleeping calmly in his well-worn nightcap, 
while the sun (the real mover, the real essence of mobility) 
is for ever getting up with many a yawn and shrug before he 
rises, or going to bed with many a sigh of lassitude and 
weariness. Take Time as a bridge slung high and dry, and 
steady as a rock over a boiling, bubbling, crashing, Niagara 
of a waterfall beneath. Perfectly inert and stationary is this 
©Id myth. He does not measure us. He wants us not. He 
never interferes with us. We want him ; we measure him ; 
we interfere with him. Chronos and logos be Greek words, I 
think, that go to make up chronology ; and logos is the word 
century, or cycle, or solstice, or equinox, or year, or hour, or 
day, we tack to the skirts of Time ; thinking, forsooth, that 
because we call him different names at different periods, and 
that those names and periods may have ceased and determined, 
that we have spent Time, or wasted Time, or employed Time. 
Tempus fugit ! Time does not fly ; and I do not fly in the 
face of the sun-dial when I deny the truth of the motto so 
often engraved thereon. It is the golden sun-light whose 
daily life and death are recorded by the unerring finger on 
the brazen page, that we waste, or spend, or employ. The 
sun was the first watchmaker, and from his rubicund dial- 
face tells us the time of day, to the confusion of the Horse 
Guards and Mr. Bennett's skeleton contrivance at the Crystal 
Palace. King Alfred with his wax chandlery; later, patient 
German savants and skilled handicraftsmen ; later still, your 
Harrisons, Dents, and Breguets, put his phases into cylindrical 
boxes and called them watches. Savants, and priests, and 
rulers had been at work, ages before, to call so many suns 
and moons centuries, years, and days. Clocks and watches 
gave us hours and minutes; and now we have the presumption 
to call this purely business-like agreement and convention 
"between Strasburg artificers, Roman high priests, stage- 
managers of Olympian games, editors of Gregorian and other 
calendars, compilers of Mangnall's Questions and tables of 
elates, quiet workmen in Clerkenwell, pretty" damsels in the 
Palais Royal, and Messrs. Partridge, Murphy, and Raphael, 



TIME AND THE IIOUE. 231 

the almanack-inakers, Time ; and we have the assurance to 
say that, because the hour runs, Time runs too : that, because 
the sand slides surely, gently, slowly, inevitably through the 
pin-like aperture between the crystal cones, that Time slides, 
passes, too. Our ancestors knew better : they did not call a 
clock a time-piece ; they called him a horologe. 

And, if I mention ancestors, I anticipate a storm of 
objections to my theory of time, suggested by the word I 
have made use of. Ancestors, my opponents will triumphantly 
cry ! why, if Time had never flown or moved, where would 
be your ancestors, where your antiquity ? 

Now, what is antiquity ? What is this you make such a 
fuss and pother about ? What is antiquity to a man, or a 
man to antiquity ? What has he to do with anything but 
Life ! and while he racks his head about antiquity, how many 
of the years, and days, and hours, that go to make up that 
life are irretrievably wasted. How many minutes he casts 
away right and left — like red-hot halfpence to boys. Yet a 
minute, my friend, is something. A minute ! how many 
years must it seem to somebody standing on a scaffold in the 
chilly morning, with the spectre of a white nightcap grinning 
over his shoulder, with the hands of Saint Sepulchre's church 
pointing to one minute to eight, and with but that minute 
plank between him and the deep, deep sea of eternity. A 
minute — will not the thousandth part thereof, consumed in a 
nimble spring to the right or the wrong side decide the odds 
between your being landed safely on a well-swept platform 
heaped with Christmas hampers, and hung round with jovial 
banners, or placards respecting Christmas excursion trains, 
and your being crushed to death beneath the remorseless 
wheels of that same excursion train, as it glides heavily along 
the treacherous rails into the station ? A minute ! — in that 
subdivision of the day how many words of hope, or love, or 
murderous accusation, or frenzied anxiety, or kindly greeting, 
will throb through the sentient wires of the telegraph, over 
marsh, and meadow, and lea — through hills and tunnels — 
across valleys and deep rivers? A minute will break the 
back of the strong steam-ship, and send her with all her 
freight of mailed warriors, and weather-beaten mariners, and 
restive chargers, down to the coral reefs and the pearls that lie 



>ain and pleasure — heat and cold— as we 
The duration of life with these ephemera 
nit seldom, exceeds, a minute. Within the 



232 HME AXT> THE HOUR. 

in dead men's eyes, to be no more heard of till the sea gives up 
its dead ! A minute decides the Derby, settles whether the 
firm of Ingots, Nuggetts, Bullion, and Co., shall go into the 
Gazette and Basinghall Street, or its senior partner, Sir John 
Ingots, into the House of Peers. Guilty, or not guilty ; the 
billet of all the bullets at a battle ; head or tail ; " how will 
you have it?" or "no effects;" — all these lie within the 
compass of a minute, of less than a minute, of the infinitesimal 
particle of a minute ! 

I have heard of some little ephemeral insects — invisible 
animalcule — billions of which, they say, could dance hornpipes 
on a needle's point — trillions of which could hold mass 
meetings on the prickle of a gooseberry — so small are they. 
Yet each of the infinitesimal entomological Lilliputians might 
possess a trifle of a hundred legs or so ; and who shall say 
each does not feel pain and pleasure — heat and cold— as we 
bigger animals do. 
sometimes reaches, but 
sixty seconds they live and die, and strut and fret their fifty 
pair of legs upon their vegetable stage. Within a minute 
they act the part for which they have been cast by the Great 
First Cause — within a minute they serve as rivets or links, 
or something microscopically small, but not despicable, in 
the Great Chain that binds all Nature to agree. If some of 
them be such strong, and vigorous, and abstemious insects 
as to live to the prodigious age of a minute and a-half, they 
must be looked at by the young animalcule — the spruce 
fellows some twenty seconds old or so, as astonishing cente- 
narians, patriarchs of the cabbage-leaf — sages of grass-blades. 
When they die, perhaps they are buried in great pomp and 
state in the pores of a strawberry — the funeral puff-ball being 
drawn by four earwigs, and all the top places on the neigh- 
bouring spear grass being at a premium ; or perchance they 
dye their venerable green locks purple-black, just as they are 
on the brink of the tomb, thrust their feeble legs into tight 
boots, manacle their trembling antenna into primrose-coloured 
gloves ; and, with hats cocked stiffly on their palsied old 
pates, hobble up and down some Regent-street of a daisy — 
some Burlington-arcade of an apple-pip, leering at the damsels 
who are carrying home Queen Mab's court dress in a cobweb 



TIME AND THE HOUR. 233 

band-box. How immensely superior are you, Mr. Lemuel 
Gulliver, looking down on these a million times diminished 
Lilliputians. How man}' - feet you have to look down upon 
these tiny things. How strong a microscope you must have 
to be able to discern even • an agglomeration of a hundred or 
two of these insect-things. Dear Lemuel, are there any 
people up yonder, in any of those shining orbs, who look 
down upon us, who are as amazingly supercilious, patronising, 
condescending as we are — none of whose microscopes would 
be strong enough to discern one hundred Mammoths all in a 
row, let alone men. Do they take us for animalcules, infusoria, 
ephemera ? Dear Lemuel, did Doctor Swift, think you, before 
the chords of his mind broke, mean to write merely a boy's 
story book, or did he gently, kindly, shrewdly try to teach us 
that we are not so very very great after all ; and that puzzled 
as we may be to find where minuteness ends, so there may be 
some thousands of planets somewhere in space where men 
grow great by degrees and beautifully larger. 

Antiquity ! what would be our poor little antiquity to 
the men in the moon, if men there be there, and bigger 
than we ? 



MY MAN. A SUM. 



I will take a man, as Lawrence Sterne took a solitary 
captive in a cell. I desire not to view, however, like the 
writer of Tristram Shandy, the iron entering into his soul. 
I have nothing to do with his thoughts, his motives, his 
feelings, his sympathies. I will take a man, and give him 
threescore and ten years to live, and breathe, and act in — a 
fair mean, I think. He shall be robust, laborious, sober, 
steady, economical of time, fond if you will of repeating the 
fallacious apothegm, " Time flies," and ever anxious to cut the 
wings of Time with the scissors of Industry. 

Providence has given my man, you will not deny, a rope or 
cable of life composed of 365 times twenty-four hours, forming 
alternate days and nights for seventy years. Give me the 
twenty-four hours to regulate the daily portion of my man by, 
and let us see how many of those hours necessity, habit, and 
the customs of the state of society he is born, and lives, and 
dies in, will allow him to turn to useful and profitable account. 

My man must sleep. He shall not be chuckle-headed, 
dunder-headed, nightcap-enamout-ed. He shall have no occa- 
sion, as a sluggard, to consider the ways of the ant. " Let 
the galled jade wince," my man's withers are unwrung when 
Doctor Watts hears the sluggard complain and express his 
wish to slumber again. Yet my man shall not observe the 
ration of sleep fixed, I believe, by George III., our gracious king: 
" Six hours for a man, seven for a woman, and eight for a fool." 
He shall be a fool in one sense at least, and sleep eight hours 
per noctem — a reasonable, decent; honest, hygienic slumber 
season. This sum of sleep will amount, in the course of my 
man's life, to twenty-four years to be deducted from the 
seventy. For twenty-four mortal years shall my man lie 
between the sheets, talking to people he never saw, sitting- 
down to dinners he is never to eat, remembering minutely 



MY MAN. A SUM. 235 

things he never knew, reconciling impossibilities through that 
system of dream-philosophy of which only the dream-master 
has the key ; listening ofttimes to ravishing strains of music, 
of which the remembrance, as they never were, will come upon 
him even when he is awake, and amid the most ordinary 
occurrences of life — strains so sweet, so mysterious, so un- 
earthly, so silent, yet so sentiently distinct, that they must 
be, I think, the tunes the angels play in heaven upon the 
golden harps. Four- and- twenty years shall my man doze 
away in " Bedfordshire." 

My man being sober, does not, necessarily, go to bed nightly 
in his boots, with a damp umbrella under his arm, his hat on 
his head, and his waterproof paletot on his back ; nor, being 
cleanly, does he rise in the morning without washing, shaving, 
shower-bathing, and ultimately dressing himself in decent 
attire. I will retrench the shower-bath. I will sink the 
existence of such things as flesh-brushes, bear's-grease, bando- 
line, whisker pomatum, musk, patchouli, and bergamot. My 
man shall be neither a fop nor a sloven. He shall not spend 
unnecessary matutinal minutes in cultivating a moustache, in 
imparting an extra curl to a whisker, or tittivating an impe- 
rial. He shall not cut himself in shaving, and waste clock 
time in searching for an old hat ; neither shall he wear tight 
boots, and consume unnecessary half hours in pulling them on; 
nor yet shall he have corns to cut, nor stays to lace. He shall 
not even be delayed in his daily toilet by the lack of shirt or 
wrist-buttons ; for I will give him a wife, and an accomplished 
wife — a domestic wife — who shall be everything he desires, 
and attend to his mother-of-pearl wants without even being- 
asked. Yet my man, though a model of cleanliness, neat- 
handedness, and simplicity, cannot get up, and go to bed, and 
dress and undress himself, in less than half-an-hour per diem. 
Ergo, deduct from seventy years, eighteen months, or one year 
and a half. 

This man of mine must live. Hence, it is essential that he 
should exercise, at certain given periods in each, day, his man- 
ducatory organs : in other words, that he should eat. He is 
not to be a glutton, or even a gourmand, wandering furtively 
all day over town in quest of trrffles, or rising with the lark 
to intercept fish -trains laden with Colchester oysters. Appe- 



236 MY MAN. A SUM. 

tites for Strasburgli pies of goose liver, for elaborate petits plats, 
for seductive Rhine wines that sparkle, and, while they sparkle, 
overcome, I do not allow him. He is not to have four courses 
daily. He shall, dispense with entrees : entremets shall be un- 
known to him. He shall not sit for so long over his dinner, 
and over the vinous beverages that follow it, that the green 
wax tapers multiply themselves unwarrantably by two, and 
dance in their sockets indecorously. He shall be a plain man, 
enjoying his plain roast and boiled, his simple steak, or unso- 
phisticated chop, with an unimpaired digestion, powers of 
mastication not to be called in question, and a frame of mind 
prompting him to eat only when he is hungry : to eat in order 
that he may live ; not to live in order that he may eat. Yet 
such a monument of abstemiousness must consume, if he take 
that bellyful of victuals essential to equable health and strength, 
at least two hours a day. He may or may not use knives and 
forks, damask napkins, hubble-bubble finger glasses ; he may 
or may not call the various meals he takes for the sustentation 
of his body, breakfast, dinner, lunch, snack, tiffin, tea, supper, 
en cas de nuit, or what not ; but, to the complexion of this two 
hours' eating daily, he must come. Turtle and venison, or 
"potatoes and point," Alderman Gobble, or Pat the labourer, 
my man eats two hours per diem. There you have six years 
more by which to thin the threescore and ten years. 

More years to take : more minute strokes to efface from the 
dial of the watch of life. Love ! Ah me ! when you and I 
and all of us can remember how many entire days and weeks 
and months we have wasted over that delusion, how callous 
and unsympathising must seem a minute calculation of the 
space love mulcts man's life of. A summer's day over a pink 
ribbon ; hours of anguish over a crossed t in a love letter ; 
days of perplexity as to whether that which you said last night 
would be taken in good part, or, indeed, as to whether you 
said it at all ; are these to be taken for nought ? They shall 
count for nothing on my man's chronometer. He shall not 
waste in despair, or die because a woman's fair. He shall 
just catch love as one might catch the typhus fever, and be 
"down" with that fever for the usual time, then grow conva- 
lescent and." get over it," and forget that he ever was ill. A 
month for that. Yet my man, without being inflammatory, is 



MY MAN. A SUM. 237 

mortal. Besides his first hot love-fever, it is but natural to 
mortality that he should feel, at certain periods during the 
seventy years he runs his race in, the power of love again ; 
not hot, strong, ferocious, rival-hating, hearts- and- darts love, 
but love the soft, the tender, the prolegomena of domestic joys 
— of singing tea-kettles, and cats purring by the kitchen fire ; 
not the love for black eyes, and ruby lips, and raven hair, but 
the love that makes us listen for a voice, that takes us four 
hundred miles to hear a word — to dwell upon a look — to press 
a hand that never can be ours. Such love — if my man feel as 
most of us do — will take him at least one hour a day. Add 
to that, the month for the first raging love-typhus, and you 
have three years more to take from seventy. 

I hope I have not exaggerated this average — this common 
mean — not denying as I do that there be some stony-hearted 
men in the world, some impervious cynics, who set their faces 
against love as they would against Popery. It must be 
remembered, too, in support of my hour a day, that all lovers 
are intolerable prattlers, and that a major part of the daily hour 
of love would be consumed in purposeless gabble — that un- 
known tongue, which only the professor of Fonetics, called 
Cupid, can expound. 

Few men are so " accursed by fate," so utterly desolate, as 
not to possess some friends or acquaintances. A man may 
have associates with whom he may cultivate the choicest 
flowers of the heaven-sent plant, friendship ; or, he may 
simply have pot companions, club friends, or business 
acquaintances. Still, he must know somebody, and, being by 
nature a talking animal, must have something to say when he 
meets his fellow-men. I do not wish to exempt my man from 
the common rule. He shall be gregarious, like his fellows. 
He shall be no misanthrope — neither a ceaseless chatterer, 
nor a stock-fish of taciturnity. He shall talk in season, saying 
only good and sensible things — not holding men by the button, 
unnecessarily, in the open street; not telling them futile 
stories of the Peninsular war ; hazarding imbecile conjectures 
about the weather, the ministry, or the state of Europe ; nor 
detailing his grievances, his ailments, or the tribulations of 
his family, out of proper time and place. Yet, I will defy 
him to consume less than one hour per diem in talking. 



This gives me three years more to deduct from the seventy oi 
my man's life. 

I have already conceded my man to be a pattern of sobriety, 
regularity, and morality. No fast man shall he be, entering 
at all sorts of hours, with his coat pockets full of door knockers 
and champagne corks ; pouring the minor contents of the coal- 
scuttle into the boots of his neighbours, or winding up his 
watch with the snuffers. He shall avoid casinos, select dancing 
academies, free-and-easies, " assaults of arms," and harmonic 
meetings. He shall never have heard of the Coal Hole ; and 
the ghastly merriment known as " life in London" after 
midnight, shall be as a sealed book to him. Yet he must 
amuse himself sometimes. " All work, and no play, makes 
Jack a dull boy." Perhaps my man belongs to a literary 
and scientific institution ; perhaps he attends Mesmeric lec- 
tures ; or he may have a fancy for Thursday evening lectures 
at his chapel; or for chemistry, and burning holes in the 
carpet and furniture with strong acids ; or for the Olympic, 
the Adelphi, or Sadler's Wells Theatres ; or for Doctor 
Bachhof&ier and the Polytechnic Institution ; or for a quiet 
nightly game at twopenny whist. At any rate, I will suppose 
that moderate amusements and the agremens of society, 
including an evening party now and then, and some high days 
and holidays at Christmas and Easter or so, will give an 
average of two hours per diem — or six years more to be struck 
off the seventy. 

Healthy and laborious and robust as I am willing to allow 
my man to be, he cannot expect to go through life without an 
attack of some of those ailments to which all human beings 
are liable. He will probably, as a child, have the usual 
allowance of teething fits, measles, hooping cough, chicken 
pox, and scarletina ; to say nothing of the supplementary, and 
somewhat unnecessary fits of sickness suffered by most babies 
through involuntary dram-drinking in a course of " Daffy's 
Elixir," " Godfrey's Cordial," and the nurse's pharmacopoeia 
in general. When my man grows up, it is probable that he 
will have two or three good fits of illness : strong fevers and 
spasms at the turning points of life. Then, there will be days 
when he will be " poorly," and days when he will, be " queer," 
and days when he will be " all overish." Altogether, I assume 



MY MAX. A SUM. 239 

that lie will be ill an hour a day, or three years during the 
seventy; and a lucky individual he will be, if he gets off with 
that allowance of sickness. 

And let it be thoroughly understood that, in this calculation, 
I have never dreamt of making my man : 

A smoker — in which case goodness alone knows how many 
hours a day he would puff away in pipes, hookahs, cigars, 
cheroots, or cigarettes. 

A drinker — or what is called, in the North of England, a 
'-'bider " in public -house bars, or snuggeries; simpering over 
a gin-noggin, or blinking at the reflection of his sodden face 
in a pewter counter. 

A " niooner," fond of staring into shop windows, or 
watching the labourers pulling up the pavement to inspect the 
gas-pipes, or listening stolidly to the dull " pech " of the 
pavier's rammer on the flags. 

A day dreamer, an inveterate chess player, an admirer of 
fly fishing, a crack shot, a neat hand at tandem driving, or an 
amateur dog fancier. Were he to be any of these, the whole 
of his daily four-and-twenty hours would be gone, before you 
could say Jack Robinson. 

No ; steady, robust, laborious, shall be this man of mine. 
Let me recapitulate, and see how many hours he has a day to 
be steady and laborious in. 

In bed 8 hours. 

Washing and dressing . . . . \ an hour. 

Eating and drinking .... 2 hours. 

Love ....... 1 hour. 

Talking 1 hour. 

Amusements 2 hours. 

Sickness 1 hour. 

Total . . . . 15i hours. 

These fifteen daily hours and a-half, amount in all to forty- 
six years and six months. To these must be added fifty-two 
da} T s in every year ; on which days, being Sundays, my man 
is forbidden to work at all. These fifty-two sabbaths amount 
in the aggregate to eight years, seven months, ten days, and 
twelve hours : and the grand total to be deducted from the 
span of man's life is fifty-five years, one month, ten days, and 
twelve hours : leaving fourteen years, ten months, nineteen 



240 MY MAN. A SUM. 



and twelve hours, for my man to be steady and 
laborious in. 

Oh, sages of the East and West ! oh, wise men of Gotham, 
for ever going to sea in bowls, political and otherwise — boastful 
talkers of the " monuments of human industry," and the 
" triumphs of human perseverance," — lecturers upon patience 
and ingenuity, what idlers you all are ! These few paltry 
years are all you can devote from threescore and ten, to 
wisdom, and learning, and art ! Atoms in immensity — 
bearers of farthing rushlights amid a blaze of gas, you must 
needs think Time was made for you, and you not made for 
Time! 

Did I so greatly err then, when, in the preceding paper, I 
asked what antiquity was to a man, or a man to antiquity ? 
Should he be licensed to prate so glibly of ages gone by, 
when he can give but so sorry an account of the years he 
really possesses for his own use and benefit ? 

"What do you call Antiquity?" the Titans might ask 
him, not in any way sneeringly, but in a tone of good- 
humoured banter. " "Where are your remote ages — your 
landmarks of the days of old ? Do you know that from the 
first day that you were permitted to call Chjristmas Day, to 
the end of that year which expired on the 31st of 
December last,-* there have only elapsed nine hundred and 
seventy-three millions, five hundred and eleven thousand, two 
hundred minutes ; — nine hundred and odd million revolutions 
of the minute hand on your watch ? And do you call that 
antiquity? Are these few minutes to count for anything 
considerable among the accumulated ages of the World?" 

The World ! I speak of ours — the parvenu — the yester- 
born — the ball that has but been some five thousand eight 
hundred and fifty-two years a rolling, whose certificate of birtl 
is but of three billions, seventy-five millions, nine hundrec 
and eleven thousand, two hundred minutes, date. Tht 
Egyptian mummies buried three thousand years ago in the 
caves behind Medinet Abou, but now present amongst us in 
the British Museum, make Time a baby. In its face, Homer, 
with his paltry three thousand years of age, seems as juvenile 
as the veriest schoolboy who ever spouted Terence in the 

* Written in January, 1853. 



MY MAN. A SUM. 241 

"Westminster Dormitory. The Chinamen, the Hindoos, nay, 
the old Egyptians even — 'Osiris, Cheops Mummy wheat and 
all — would make Time smile with pity, if the mouth of Time 
were not immovable like himself. 

One thousand eight hundred and fifty-two years, only, have 
been numbered with the dead since the Shepherds saw the 
Star in the East. The lives of thirty-eight men, each living 
an average life of fifty years, would take us back to Solomon's 
temple in all its glory — to the pool of Bethesda, the feast by 
the mountain, and the Sunday corn-field. More ; each century 
can boast of some patriarch, some centenarian, some old Parr, 
in some quarter or other of the globe. Acting on this 
calculation, we should want but the lives of eighteen men and 
three quarters, to reach to more than the time of Herod of 
Galilee, and Caiaphas the high priest. 

Talk not to my man, then, of your antiquity. The lives of 
four fifty years' men place within our grasp Oliver Cromwell 
in semi -sovereignty at Whitehall, Blake scouring the seas for 
Dutchmen, Prince Ptupert buccaneering, the " young man" 
Charles Stuart " hard up " at the Hague, entreating the Queen 
of Bohemia to prick him down corantos and send him a fiddler. 
Seven men of the like age flaunt Peter the Hermit's cross in 
our eyes; pour the refuse of Europe on the hot shores of 
Syria ; pit the crafty Greeks of Byzantium against the rude 
half-bandit Latins ; chorus in our ears the Crusaders' war- 
cry, ' ' Hierosolyma est-perdita ! ' ' Not quite twenty half-century 
men, and we shall be at Hastings, where, in years yet to come, 
the Abbey of Battle is to be built — by the side of Harold the 
last Saxon king — of Guillaume Taillefer — of William of 
Normandy, erst called the Bastard, but soon to bear the 
prouder sobriquet of Conqueror. 

Antiquity ! I might have had a grandfather (if I ever had 
one, which is doubtful to Your Highness) who might have 
fought at Preston Pans. My great-grandfather might have 
beheaded Charles the First. My great-great-grandfather 
might have talked scandal about Queen Elizabeth, when 
Queen Elizabeth was alive to cut his head off for daring to 
talk it — or for daring to have such a thing as a head about 
him, if so her Royal humour ran. 

Still, man, be thankful. The fourteen years, ten months, 



242 MY MAN. A SUM. 

and odd, allowed yon to work and learn in are sufficient. 
Who shall gainsay it ! Wisdom and Mercy have struck the 
great average of compulsory idleness in man's life. I take 
one moral of my man to be that an Injustice or a Wrong, 
which seems in his slight vision eternal, is but a passing 
shadow that Heaven, for its great purposes, permits to fall 
upon this earth. What has been, may be, shall be, must be, 
ery the unjust stewards and wrong-doers. No, my good 
friends, not so. Not even though your families " came over" 
with the Conqueror, or trace back in a straight line to the 
wolf that suckled Romulus and his brother. Be in the right, 
keep moving and improving, stand not too much on that small 
footing of antiquity, or a very few generations of My Man 
shall trip you up, and your ancient places shall know you no 
more. 



PHILIP STUBBES; 

OR, 
VANITY PAIR IN THE OLDEN TIME. 



The new palace at Westminster is a very magnificent 
building, in (I am quite willing to believe Sir Charles Barry) 
the purest style of Gothic architecture ; and the large, not to 
say extravagant, sums of money which have been, and will be 
for the next half-century or so, expended in its erection, speak 
biglily for the wealth and resources of this favoured empire. 
The Horse Guards Blue, also, are a splendid body of men. 
I scarcely know what to admire most in their equipment : 
their black horses with the long tails, their bright helmets — 
likewise with long tails — their jack-boots, or their manly 
moustachios. Among the officers of this superb corps are to 
be found, I have been told, some of the brightest ornaments of 
our juvenile aristocracy. But, admiring them, I cannot quite 
withhold my mede of admiration for the Queen's beefeaters — 
for the Royal coachman, the Royal footmen, the Royal out- 
riders, and the Honourable Corps of Gentlemen- at- Arms. In 
all these noble and expensively-dressed institutions, I am 
proud to recognise signs of the grandeur and prosperity of my 
country. Likewise in the Elder Brethren of the Trinity 
House, the Lord Mayor's barge and the Lord Mayor's court ; 
the loving cup, the Old Bailey black cap, the Surrey Sessions, 
St. George's Hall at Liverpool, the Manchester AthenEeum, 
the Scott Monument at Edinburgh, special juries, the Board of 
Health, and the Crystal Palace at Sydenham. What a pity 
it is that, in the face of all these grand and flourishing 
establishments, there should be an inevitable necessity for the 
existence of Model Prisons, Reformatories, Ragged Schools, 
Magdalen Hospitals, and Administrative Reform Associations ! 
What a pity it is that, with our fleets and armies that cost so 
many millions of money, and look, and are, so brave and 

r 2 



244 PHILIP STUBBES. 

serviceable, there should be incompetent commanders, ignorant 
administrators, and imbecile subordinates ! 

How many other pities need to be recounted to show that 
we are in a bad way ? Need we turn to the collective wisdom 
assembly, the house of Parler and Mentir, with its feeble 
jokes, logic-chopping, straw-splitting, tape-tying, tape-untying 
to tie again ; double-shuffling, word-eating, quipping- quirking, 
and wanton- wileing ? Need we notice the recurrence of that, 
to me, fiendishly-insolent word " laughter," that speckles par- 
liamentary debates like a murrain ? Are we not in a bad 
way while we have Chancery suits sixt}^ years old, and ad- 
mirals and generals on active service verging on eighty ? Are 
we not in a bad way when working people live in styes like 
hogs, and, with little to eat themselves, have always a knife 
and fork laid (by the chief butler, Neglect) for the guest who 
may be expected to dine with them from day to day — the 
cholera ? Is it not to be in a bad way to be so often at war, 
somewhere or with somebod} T , to pay double income tax, to 
be afflicted with a spotted fever in the shape of gambling that 
produces a delirium — sending divines from their pulpits to 
stockjobbing, and turning English merchants and bankers, 
whose integrity was once proverbial, into cheats and swind- 
lers ? Surely, too, it must be a bad way to be in, to see 
religion painted upon banners, and temperance carted about 
like a wild-beast show, and debauchery in high places ; to 
have to give courts and church, arts and schools, laws and 
learning, youth and age, the lie ; and as the old balladist sings 
in the " Soul's Errand," 

" If still they should reply, 
Then give them still the lie." 

But bad as is the state of things now-a-days, it was an 
hundred times worse, I opine, in the days of the six acts, the 
fourpenny stamp, the resurrection men, the laws that were 
made for every degree, and so hanged people for almost every 
degree of crime. It was worse when there were penal enact- 
ments against Catholics, and arrests by mesne process. It was 
worse before steam, before vaccination, before the Habeas 
Corpus, before the Reformation ; it was certainly an incom- 
parably more shocking state of things in the days of Mr. 
Philip Stubbes. 



PHILIP STUBBES. 245 

And who was Mr. Philip Stubbes ? Dames and gentles, 
he flourished circa Anno Domini fifteen eighty-five, in what 
have been hitherto, but most erroneously, imagined to be the 
palmy days of Queen Elizabeth. Lamentable delusion! 
There never could, according to Mr. Stubbes, have existed a 
more shocking state of things than in the assumed halcyon 
age of Good Queen Bess. For what, save a profound con- 
viction of the wickedness and immorality of the age, could 
have moved our author to write and publish, in the year 
eighty-five, that famous little twelvemo volume called — " The 
Anatomie of Abuses : being a Discourse or Brief Summarie 
of such Notable Vices and Corruptions as now raigne in many 
Christian Countreys in the Worlde : but (especially) in the 
Countrey of Ailgna : Together with most Fearful Examples of 
God's Judgements, executed upon the Wicked for the same, as 
well in Ailgna of late as in other Places elsewhere. Very 
Godlye : To be read of all True Christians everywhere, but 
most chiefly to be regarded in England. Made Dialogue- 
wise. By Philip Stubbes." 

Ailgna, it need scarcely be said, is England, and the 
abuses, vices, and corruptions anatomised and denounced are 
all English. Mr. Stubbes must have been a man of some 
eourage, both moral and physical, for he has not hesitated to 
attack, not only the vices and follies of the day, but also some 
very ticklish matters of religion and government. That he 
did so with impunity is to be presumed, as we hear nothing 
of the Anatomie of Abuses having been made a Star Chamber 
matter, or that Mr. Stubbes ever suffered in his own anatomy 
by stripes or imprisonment, th^ ''little ease," "the scaven- 
ger's daughter," the pillory, the loss of ears, or the loss of 
money by fine. 

I must state frankly, that I have not been wholly disin- 
terested in adverting to Mr. Stubbes in this place. Something 
like envy, something resembling democratic indignation, 
prompted me to make the old Elizabethan worthy a house- 
hold word ; for, Stubbes is very scarce. He has never, to my 
knowledge, been reprinted, and none but the rich can possess 
an original copy of the Anatomie of Abuses. He sells — musty 
little twelvemo as he is — for very nearly his weight in gold ; 
and it was the fact of a single Stubbes having fetched, at the 



246 PHILIP STUBBES. 

sale of the Bakerian collection of rare books and autographs, 
no less a sum than nine pounds ten shillings sterling, that 
induced me to hie instanter to the reading-room of the British 
Museum ; to search the catalogue anxiously ; to find Stubbes 
triumphantly ; to anatomise his Anatomie gaily, and with- a 
■will. May the shadow of the British Museum library never 
be less ! I don't care for the defective catalogue ; I can suffer 
the attacks of the Museum flea ; I have Stubbes ; and Lord 
Yiscount Dives can't have any more of him, save the power of 
tearing him up to light his pipe with. I don't envy Dives. 
My library is as good as his, with all its Turkey carpets, 
patent reading-desks, busts, and red morocco trimmings to 
the shelves. 

The interlocutors or speakers in the Anatomie of Abuses in 
Ailgna are Philoponus and Spudeus. Spudeus, Philoponus, 
and Stubbes to boot, being long since gone the way of all 
twelvemo writers, I need not trouble my readers with what 
they severally said. A summary of the substance of their 
discourse will be sufficient. I may premise, however, that 
Spudeus opens the dialogue by wishing Philoponus good 
morrow : adding to his salutation the pithy, though, scarcely 
appropriate, apophthegm that " flying fame is often a liar." 
To which answers Philoponus, that he wishes Spudeus good 
morrow, too, with all his heart. The interchange of civilities 
being over, Philoponus informs his friend that he has been 
lately travelling in a certain island, once named Ainabla, after 
Ainatib, but now presently called Ailgna, and forthwith 
launches out into a tremendous diatribe on the abuses of that 
powerful but abandoned country. 

Ailgna, says Stubbes, through his eidolon Philoponus, is a 
famous and pleasant land, immured about hj the sea, as it 
were, with a wall ; the air is temperate, the ground fertile, 
the earth abounding with all things for man and beast. The 
inhabitants are a strong kind of people, audacious, bold, 
puissant, and heroical : of great magnanimity, valiancy, and 
juowess, of an incomparable feature, an excellent complexion, 
and in all humanity inferior to none under the sun. But 
there is a reverse to this flattering picture. It grieveth 
Stubbes to remember their licences, to make mention of their 
wicked ways ; yet, unaccustomed as he is to public abuse, he 



PHILIP STUBBES. 247 

must say that there is not a people more corrupt, lying, 
wicked, and perverse, living on the face of the earth. 

The number of abuses in Ailgna is infinite, but the chief 
one is pride. The Ailgnan pride is tripartite : pride of the 
heart, pride of the mouth, and pride of apparel ; and the last, 
according to our anatomiser, is the deadliest, for it is opposite 
to the eye, and visible to the sight, and enticeth others 
to sin. 

Stubbes says little about pride of the heart, which he defines 
as a rebellious elation, or lifting oneself up on high. The 
worthy old reformer probably remembered, and in good time, 
that pride of heart was an abuse, slightly prevalent among 
the princes and great ones of the earth : among brothers of 
the sun and moon, and most Christian kings, and defenders of 
faiths they had trampled on, and sovereigns by the grace of 
the God they had denied. The good man held his tongue, 
and saved his ears. But, on pride of the mouth — in less 
refined Ailgnian, bragging — he is very severe. Such pride, 
he says, is the saying or crying aperto ore, with open mouth, 
" I am a gentleman, I am worshipful, I am honourable, 
I am noble, and I cannot tell what. My father did this. My 
grandfather did that. I am sprung of this stock, and I am 
sprung of that ; whereas Dame Nature, Philoponus Stubbes 
wisely remarks, bringeth us all into the world after one sort, 
and receiveth us all again into the womb of our mother — the 
bowels of the earth — all in one and the same manner, without 
any difference or diversity at all." It is somewhat strange 
that with these healthy notions of equality, and contempt of 
mere rank, Philoponus should condescend to dedicate his book 
to " the Right Honourable, and his very singular good Lord, 
Philip, Earl of Arundel," and that he should conclude his 
dedication in this fashion: "Thus, I cease to molest your 
sacred ears any more with my rude speeches, beseeching 
your good Lordship, not only to admit this, my book, into 
your honour's patronage and protection, but also to persist, 
the first defender thereof, against the swinish crew of railing 
Zoilus and flouting Momus, with their complies of bragging 
Thrasoes, and barking Phormicons, to whom it is easier to 
deprave all things than to amend themselves." Oh ! loaves 
and fishes ! Oh ! mighty power of a Lord's name ! Sacred 



2-48 PHILIP STUBBES. 

ears ! Oh ! vanity of heart, and mouth, and dress, and 
Stubbes, and all things human ! 

Circe's cups and Medea's pots, Mr. Stubbes pertinently, 
but severely remarks, have made England drunken with pride 
of apparel. Not the Athenians, the Spaniards, the Hungarians 
(known, as they are, according to Mr. Ingoldsby, as the proud 
Hungarians), the Caldeans, the Helvetians, the Zuitzers, the 
Moscovians, the Cantabrigians, the Africanes, or the Ethio- 
pians — (Mercy on us ! what a salad of nations !) — no people, 
in short under the zodiac of heaven have half as much pride 
in exquisite bravery of apparel, as the inhabitants of Ailgna. 
No people is so curious in new fangles, wearing, merely 
because it is new, apparel most unhandsome, brutish, and 
monstrous. Other countries esteem not so much silks, velvets, 
taffeties, or grograms, but are contented with carzies, frizes, 
and rugges. Nobles, Philoponus Stubbes maintains, may 
wear gorgeous attire, and he gives the why ; magistrates may 
wear sumptuous dresses, and he gives the wherefore ; but he 
complains bitterly that it is now hard to know who is noble, 
who is worshipful, who is a gentleman ; for those that are 
neither of the nobility, gentry, or yeomanry, no, nor yet any 
magistrate or officer of the commonwealth (not even a beadle, 
I suppose), go daily in silks, satins, damasks, and taffeties, 
notwithstanding that they be both base by birth, mean by 
estate, and servile by calling. And this, Mr. Stubbes counts 
a great confusion in a Christian commonwealth. 

Of a different opinion to Philip Philoponus Stubbes, regard- 
ing exquisite bravery of apparel, was Michel Equihem, 
Seigneur of Montaigne, who, at about the same time that 
Stubbes was fulminating his anathemas against pride of dress 
in England, was writing his immortal essays in his quiet 
home in France. Montaigne deprecates sumptuary laws in 
general ; but he would seek to discourage luxury, by advising 
kings and princes to adopt simplicity. "As long," he says, 
" as it is possible only for kings to eat turbot, and for kings' 
sons to wear cloth of gold, turbot and cloth of gold will be 
in credit, and objects of envy and ambition. Let kings 
abandon these signs of grandeur. They have surely enough 
without them. Or if sumptuary laws be needed, let them 
remember how Zeleucus purified the corrupted manners of 



PHILIP STUBBES. 249 

the Locrians. These were his ordinances : That no lady of 
condition should have her train held up, or be accompanied 
by more than one page or chambermaid, unless she happened 
to be drunk ; that no lady should wear brocades, velvet, or 
pearls, unless she happened to be disreputable ; and that no 
man should wear gold rings on his fingers or a velvet doublet 
on his back, unless he could prove himself to be a cheat and 
cut-throat. It is astonishing how plain the Locrians dressed 
after these edicts. 

After descanting awhile upon Adam and Eve, their mean 
attire — Diogenes, his austerity — and a certain Grecian who, 
coming to court in his philosopher's weed, was repulsed there- 
from, Mr. Stubbes favours us with an excellent apophthegm, 
concerning another philosopher who was invited to a king's 
banquet, and wishing for a spittoon, and seeing no place 
of expectoration (for every place was hanged with cloth 
of gold, cloth of silver tinsel, arras, tapestry, and the 
like), coolly expectorated in the king's face, saying : " It 
is meet, O king, that I spit in the plainest place ! " After 
this, Mr. Stubbes, taking the apparel of Ailgna in degrees, 
discharges the vials of his wrath upon the " diverses kinds 
of hats." 

Sometimes, he says, they use them sharp on the crown, 
peaking up like the shaft of a steeple, standing a quarter of 
a yard above the crowns of their heads — some more, some 
less, as pleases the phantasy of their inconstant minds : others 
be flat and broad, like the battlements of a house. These 
hats have bands — now black, now white, now russet, uoav red, 
now green, now yellow, now this, now that — never content 
with one colour or fashion, two days to an end. " And thus," 
says Philip, " they spend the Lord, his treasure — their golden 
years and silver days in wickedness and sin," — and hats. 
Some hats are made of silk, some of velvet, taffety, sarsenet, 
wool, or a certain kind of fine hair fetched from beyond seas, 
whence many other kind of vanities do come besides. These 
they call beuer (beaver) hats, of many shillings price. And 
no man, adds Philip, with melancholy indignation, is thought 
of any account, unless he has a beuer or taffety hat, pinched 
and cunningly carved of the best fashion. Wore Philip 
Philoponus Stubbes such a tile, I wonder — beuer or taffety — 



250 PHILIP STUBBES. 

when he went to pay his respects to the sacred ears of his 
singular good lord, the Earl of Arundel ? 

Feathers in hats are sternly denounced, as sterns of pride 
and ensigns of vanity — as fluttering sails and feathered flags 
of defiance to virtue. And there are some rogues (sarcastic 
Philip ! ) that make a living by dyeing and selling these 
cockscombs, and many more fools that wear them. 

As to ruffs, Philip Philoponus roundly asserts that they 
are an invention of the Devil in the fulness of his malice. 
For in Ailgna, look you, they have great monstrous ruffs of 
cambric, lawn, holland or fine cloth — some a quarter of a 
yard deep — standing forth from their necks, and hanging 
over their shoulder points like a veil. But if iEolus, with 
his blasts (malicious Stubbes !) — or Neptune, with his storms, 
chance to hit upon the crazy bark of their bruised ruffs, then 
they go flip-flap in the wind, like rags that go abroad ; or 
hang upon their shoulders like the dishclout of a slut (ungal- 
lant Philip !). This is a shocking state of things enough, 
but this is not all. The arch enemy of mankind, not content 
with his victory over the children of pride in the invention of 
ruffs, has malignantly devised two arches or pillars to under- 
prop the kingdom of great ruffs withal — videlicet, supportasses 
and stahch. Now, supportasses are a certain device made of 
wires crested, whipped over with gold, silver thread, or silk, 
to be applied round the neck under the ruff, upon the outside 
of the band, to bear up the whole frame and body of the ruff 
from hanging and falling down. As for starch, it is a certain 
liquid matter wherein the Devil hath willed the people of 
Ailgna to wash and clip their ruffs well, which, being dry, 
will then stand stiff and inflexible about their necks. In 
another portion of the Anatomie, Stubbes calls starch the 
Devil's liquor. 

This persistent denunciation of the harmless gluten of 
wheat flour, on the part of this quaint old enthusiast, is very 
curious to consider. How an educated Englishman — a scholar, 
too, as Stubbes undoubtedly was — could, in the Augustan age 
of Queen Elizabeth — in the very days when Shakspeare was 
writing his plays and Bacon his essays — gravely sit down and 
affirm that the Devil had turned clearstarcher, and lured souls 
to perdition through the medium of the wash-tub, passes my 



PHILIP STUBBES. 251 

comprehension. I should be inclined to set Philip down at 
once as a crazy fanatic, did I not remember with shame that 
in this present year of the nineteenth century there are 
educated Christian mistresses in our present Ailgna who look 
upon ringlets and cap-ribbons in their female servants as little 
less than inventions of the Evil One ; that there are yet 
schoolmasters who sternly forbid the use of steel pens to their 
pupils as dangerous and revolutionary implements ; that there 
are yet believers in witchcraft ; and customers to fortune- 
tellers, and takers of Professor Methusaleh's pills. I dare say 
Stubbes and his vagaries were laughed at, as they deserved to 
be, by the sensible men of Queen Elizabeth's time ; but that, 
on the mass of the people, his fierce earnest invectives against 
the fopperies of dress made a deep and lasting impression. 
This book-baby twelvemo of Philip Philoponus is but a babe 
in swaddling-clothes now ; but he will be sent anon to the 
school of stern ascetic puritanism, and Mr. Prynne's Unlove- 
liness of Lovelocks will be his horn-book. Growing adolescent 
and advanced in his humanities, his soul will yearn for stronger 
meats, and the Solemn League and Covenant will be put into his 
hand. He will read that, and graduate a Roundhead, and 
fight at Naseby, and sit down before Basing House, and shout 
at Westminster, and clap his hands at Whitehall. So, Philip 
Stubbes' denunciations will be felt in their remotest conse- 
quences, and starch will stiffen round the neck till it cuts off 
King Charles the First's head. 

Our reformer's condemnation of starch is clenched by a 
very horrible story — so fearsome that I scarcely have courage 
to transcribe it ; yet remembering how many young men of 
the present day are giving themselves up blindly to starch as 
applied to all-round collars, and wishing to bring them to a 
sense of their miserable condition, and a knowledge of what 
they may reasonably expect, if they persist in their present 
pernicious course of life and linen, I will make bold to tell the 
great starch catastrophe. 

The fearful judgment showed upon a gentlewoman of 
Eprautna (?) (in the margin, Antwerp) of late, even the 22d 
of May, 1582. This gentlewoman, being a very rich merchant- 
man's daughter, upon a time was invited to a wedding which 
was solemnised in that town, against which day she made 



252 PHILIP STUBBES. 

great preparation for the "pluming of herself in gorgeous 
array" (this reads like Villi kins and his Dinah), that, as her 
body was most beautiful, fair, and proper, so that her attire 
in every respect might be correspondent to the same. For the 
accomplishment of which she curled her hair, she dyed her 
locks, and laid them out after the best manner. Also she 
coloured her face with waters and ointments. But in no case 
could she get any (so curious and dainty was she) that would 
starch and set her ruffs and neckerchief to her mind; where- 
fore she sent for a couple of laundresses, who did their best to 
please her humours, but in any case they could not. Then 
fell she to swear and tear (oh ! shocking state of things in 
Antwerp, when gentlewomen tore and swore !), and curse and 
ban, casting the ruffe under feet, and wishing that the Devil 
might take her when she wore any of those ruffs again. In 
the meantime, the Devil transforming himself into a young 
man, as brave and proper as she in every point of outward 
appearance, came in, feigning himself to be a lover or suitor 
unto her. And seeing her thus agonised, and in such a 
"pelting chafe," he demanded of her the cause thereof. Who 
straightway told him [as women can conceal nothing that 
lyeth upon their stomachs) how she was abused in the setting 
of her ruffs, which, hearing, he promised to please her mind, 
and thereto took in hand the setting of her ruffs, which he 
formed to her great contentation and liking, insomuch as she, 
looking at herself in the glass (as the Devil bade her), became 
greatly enamoured of him. This done, the young man kissed 
her, and in doing whereof he " writhe her neck in sonder : " 
so she died miserably, her body being metamorphosed into 
blue and black colours (this black and blue metamorphosis 
has a suspiciously walking-stick appearance, and in these 
days would have simply rendered the young man amenable to 
six months' hard labour under the Aggravated Assaults Act). 
The gentlewoman's face, too, became " ogglesome to behold." 
This being known, preparations were made for her burial ; a 
rich coffin was prepared, and her fearful body laid therein, 
covered up veiy sumptuously. Four strong men immediately 
essayed to lift up the corpse, but could not move it. ' Then 
five attempted the like, but could not once stir it from the 
place where it stood. Whereat, the standers-by marvelling, 



PHILIP STUBBES. 253 

caused the coffin to be opened, to see the cause thereof. 
" Where they found the body to be taken away, and a 
black cat, very lean and deformed, sitting in the coffin, a 
setting of great ruffs, and frizzling of hair to the great fear 
and wonder of all the beholders." An ogglesome and fearful 
sight ! 

The next article of apparel to which Mr. Stubbes ■ takes 
exception is the doublet. Oh ! he cries ; the monstrous 
doublets in Ailgna ! It appears that it is the fashion to have 
them hang down to the middle of the thighs, and so hard- 
quilled, stuffed, bombasted, and sewed, that the wearers can 
neither work nor play in them. Likewise are there " big- 
bellied doublets," which betoken " gormandice, gluttony, riot, 
and excess." And he has heard of one gallant who had his 
doublet stuffed with four, five, or six pounds of Bombast. 
That kind of stuffing has not quite gone out among our 
gallants yet. He says nothing of what their doublets may be 
made — velvet, satin, gold, silver, chamlet, or what not ; but 
he lifts up his voice plaintively against the pinking, slashing, 
carving, jagging, cutting, and snipping of these garments. 
We almost fancy that we are listening to Petruchio rating the 
tailor in the Taming of the Shrew. 

There is a " great excess in hosen," Stubbes is sorry to 
remark in Ailgna. Some are called French hosen, some 
Venetian, and some Gaily hosen. They are paned, cut, and 
draped out with costly ornaments, with cannions annexed, 
reaching down below the knees. And they cost enormous 
sums ; Oh, shameless Ailgna ! " In times past," says Mr. 
Stubbes, rising almost to sublimity in his indignation, " kings 
(as old historiographers in their books yet extant do record) 
would not disdain to wear a pair of hosen of a noble, ten 
shillings or a mark piece ; but now it is a small matter to 
bestow twenty nobles, ten pounds, twenty, forty, fifty, nay a 
hundred pounds on one pair of breeches, (Lord be merciful to 
us!) and yet this is thought no abuse neither." Add to these 
costly hosen the diversity of netherstocks in Ailgna; "corked 
shoes, pantoffles, and pinsnets;" the variety of vain cloaks, 
and jerkins; the " Turkish Impietie of costly clokes;" 
bugled cloaks, ruffling swords, and daggers, gilt and damasked, 
and you will have some idea of the shocking state of things 



254 PHILIP STUBBES. 

in Ailgna in the year 1585, or, as Philip pathetically ex- 
pressed it, the " miserie of these daies." 

Presently comes this sumptuary censor to a particular 
description of woman's apparel in Ailgna. I have not space 
to follow him step by step through the labyrinthine region of 
female costume, and, indeed, he is often so very particular 
that it would often be as inconvenient as dinrcult to follow 
him.. Cursorily I may remark, that Philip is dreadfully 
severe upon the colouring of ladies' faces with oils, unguents, 
liquors, and waters ; that he quotes St. Cyprian against face- 
painting ; and Hieronymus, Chrysostom, Calvin, and Peter 
Martyr, against musks, civets, scents, and such-like " slibber- 
sauces." Trimmings of ladies' heads are the Devil's nets. 
Nought but perdition can come to a people who make holes 
in their ears to hang rings and wells oy, and who cut their 
skins to set precious stones in themselves. And is it not a 
glaring shame that some women in Ailgna wear doublets and 
jerkins, as men have, buttoned up the breast, and made with 
wings, welts, and pinions on the shoulders, as man's apparel 
is. Do you remember the ladies' paletots, the ladies' waist- 
coats of three or four years since ? How little times do alter, 
to be sure ! As for costly gowns, impudent rich petticoats 
and kirtles; stockings of silk, Tearnsey, Crewell, and fine 
cloth, curiously indented at every point with quirks, clockees, 
and open seams, cawked shoes, slippers powdered with gold, 
Devil's spectacles in the shape of looking-glasses ; sweeted 
gloves ; nosegays and posies ; curious smells, that annubilate 
the spirits, and darken the senses ; masks and visors to ride 
abroad in ; fans, which are the Devil's bellows, and similar 
enormities of female attire, — the number of them is infinite, 
and their abomination utter. t 

I need scarcely say that the apparel of the people of Ailgna 
forms but one section of the abuses anatomised by old Stubbes. 
If my reader should have any curiosity to know aught con- 
cerning the vices and corruptions of hand-baskets, gardens, 
and covetousness ; how meats bring destruction ; the dis- 
commodities of drunkenness ; what makes things dear ; the 
manner of church ales ; the tyranny of usurers ; how a man 
ought to swear ; the condemnation of stage plays ; the 
observance of the sabbath, and the keeping of wakes in 



PHILIP STUBBES. 255 

Ailgna — all as conducive to a shocking state of things — he 
may draw upon me at sight, and I will honour the draft. 



Grant me a few last words with Philip Philoponus, the 
Reformer, ladies and gentlemen. I know what a patient long- 
suffering public you are ; how in this and preceding ages you 
have borne, without a murmur, all Prynne's folios, all Sir 
Richard Blackmore's endless epics, all the interminable novels 
of Mdlle. de Scuderi. I know how, after Mr. Baxter's Last 
Words had been published, you accepted with melancholy 
resignation the More Last Words of Mr. Baxter. It is a 
shame, I know, to trespass on your good nature ; but Stubbes 
is in earnest, and is burning to tell you more of the shocking 
state of things that existed in England in 1585. 

Philip winds up his tirade against costly apparel by a final 
fling at swells in general. " Is it any marvel," he asks, "if 
they stand on their pantoffles, and hoyse up their sails so high ! 
But whether they have argent to maintain this gear or not, it 
is not material, for they will have it one way or other, or else 
they will sell or mortgage their lands, or go a-hunting on 
Suter's (Shooter's) Hill, or Stangate Hole, with loss of their 
lives at Tiburne in a rope." Our swells are not quite reduced to 
such dire extremities in the reign of Queen Victoria. Long after 
lands have been mortgaged, and credit exhausted, the lively 
kite can be flown, and the valiant "bit of stiff" can be done. 
Young Rakewell does not turn highwayman now; he goes 
through the Insolvent Court, or emigrates to the diggings in 
Australia, or California. 

It is really astonishing, deceitful as is the heart above all 
things, and desperately wicked, what a miserable paucity in 
invention there is in our crimes. We find the very same 
rogueries exposed in Philip Stubbes' s book as are daily adju- 
dicated upon by the magistrates at our police courts, every day 
in the week. Speaking of bought hair and coloured (tremble 
ye ladies with fronts !) as worn by females, he says, "And if 
there be any poor women (as, now and then, we see God doeth 
bless them with beauty as well as the rich) that have fair hair, 
these nice dames will not rest till they have bought it. Or if 
any children have fair hair, they will entice them into a secret 



25 G PHILIP STUEBES. 

place, and either by force, or for a penny or two, will cut off 
their hair ; as I heard that one did in the city of Munidnol, of 
late, who, meeting a little child with very fair hair, inveigled 
her into a house, promised her a penny, and so cut off her 
hair, — and besides, took most of her apparel." Civilisation 
has increased wonderfully — oh, dear, yes ! but has crime de- 
creased, or altered one single lineament of its hideous face ? 
Nice dames, it is true, no longer go about with brandished 
scissors, vowing vengeance to the fair hair of children ; but 
how many "good Mrs. Browns" are there, and how many 
cases of child- stripping throughout the year at the London 
police-courts. 

Mr. Stubbes proceeds to enter into the discussion of certain 
questions, into which I cannot, for obvious reasons, follow him. 
I notice, however, that he rails much at the absurditie of 
ecclesiastical magistrates making dissolute persons do penance 
in church in white sheets, with white wands in their hands. 
The congregation do nought but laugh, he says, and the peni- 
tent has his usual clothes underneath. The severity of the 
measures proposed by Philip for putting down vice would 
certainly astonish our modern Society for the suppression 
thereof. Vicious persons, he suggests, should either "drinke 
a full draught of Moises cup, that is, taste of present death, 
as God's word doth command, and good policy allow ; or else,, 
if that be thought too severe, they might be cauterised and 
seared with a hot iron on the cheek and forehead, to the end 
that the children of Satan might be discerned from honest and 
chaste Christians." If Mr. Stubbes' suggestions were ever to- 
be acted upon (and vagaries far more fantastic and absurd 
have passed into law even in this, our own time), what a 
demand for red-hot pokers there would be, to be sure ! 

Stubbes bewaileth beef. He is speaking of the great excess 
in delicate fare, the variety of dishes with curious sauces, such 
as the veriest Helluo, the insatiablest glutton, would not desire: 
the condiments, confections, and spiceries, an<J how meats 
bring destruction. " Oh ! what nicety is this ! " he cries. 
"Oh! farewell, former world; for I have heard my father 
say that, in his day, one dish or two of wholesome meat was 
thought sufficient for a man of worship to dine withal ; and if 
they had three or four kinds, it was reputed a sumptuous feast. 



PHILIP STUBBES. 257 

A good lump of beef was thought then good meat, and able 
for the best ; but now it is thought too gross for their tender 
stomachs to digest." I wonder whether old Philip Stubbes 
ever courted the Muses — ever turned a rhyme in his younger 
days. If not actually one of the authors, he might have 
added an admirable stanza, touching beef, to that glorious 
chant When this Old Cap was New. In respect to how far 
meats bring destruction, Mr. Stubbes tells us, that a people 
given to belly cheere and gluttony must eventually and inevi- 
tably come to worshipping of stocks and stones. Belly cheer, 
I am afraid, is yet far from being eradicated in our land, but 
I have not yet heard that the viands of that great diplomatic 
cook, Careme, ever drove Metternich or Talleyrand to the 
worship of Mumbo-Jumbo ; that any alderman of London 
was ever known to bow down, after a turtle dinner, before 
Gog and Magog ; that the publication of M. Louis-Eustache 
Ude's work ever made any converts to fetichism ; or that 
there was ever a disposition on the part of the committee of 
the Reform Club to set up a pagod in the vestibule during 
the administration of their kitchen by M. Soyer. With all 
this feasting and belly cheer there is, it appears, but small 
hospitality in Stubbes' England, and cold comfort for the poor. 
For, while there are some men who, out of forty pounds a- 
year, " count it small matter to dispend forty thereof in 
spices " (?) ; and though a hundred pounds are often spent in 
one house in banqueting ; yet the poor have little or nothing : 
if they have anything it is but the refuse meat, scraps, and 
parings, such as a dog would not eat, and well if they can get 
that, too; and, now and then, not a few have whipping 
cheer to feed themselves. 

Says Spudeus to Philoponus (Spudeus is one of the most 
excellent listeners I ever met with) — says he, quite cheerfully, 
as if the shocking state of things rather tickled him, " You 
spake of drunkenness, brother — what say you of that?" 

What has Mr. Stubbes to say against drunkenness — what 
hasn't he to say ? He says that it is a most horrible vice, and 
too much practised in England. Every country-town, city, 
village, hamlet, and other places have abundance of ale-houses, 
taverns, and inns, which are so fraught with maltworms every 
day that you would wounder to see them. You shall have 



258 PHILIP STUBBES. 

them there, sitting at the wine and good ale, all the day long 
■ — yea, all the night, too — and, peradventure, for a whole 
week together, so long as any money is left, swyllying, gully- 
ing, and carousing one to another, till never a one can speak 
a ready word. Then, when with the spirit of the butterie 
they are thus possessed, a world it is to consider their gestures 
and demeanours towards one another, and towards everyone 
else. How they stutter and stammer, stagger and reel to and 
fro like madmen, which is most horrible : some fall to swear- 
ing, cursing, and banning, interlacing their speeches with 
curious terms of ogglesome woordes. ... A man once 
dronke with wine, doth he not resemble a brute beast rather 
than a Christian man ? For do not his eyes begin to stare, 
and to be red, fiery, and bleared, blubbering forth seas of 
tears ? Doth he not froth and foam at the mouth like a boar ? 
Doth not his head become as a millstone, and his heels as 
feathers ? Is he able to keep one up, or the other down ? 
Are not his wits drowned — his understanding altogether 
decayed ? The drunkard in his drunkenness killeth his friend, 
revileth his lover, discloseth his secrets, and regardeth no man. 
After this, Mr. Stubbes relates the following story, which I re- 
commend for modern adoption in the Temperance oration way : 
On the 8th of February, 1578, in the country of Swaben, 
there were dwelling eight men — citizens and citizens' sons — 
all tailors, very riotously and prodigally inclined. The names 
of these young Swabs, if I may be allowed to call them so, 
were Adam Giebens, George Repell, Jhon Reisell, Peter Herf- 
dorfe, Jhon Wagenaer, Simon Henricks, Herman Frons, and 
Jacob Hermans. All of them would needs go to the taverne 
on the Sabbath-day, in the morning, very early. And, coming 
to the house of one Anthony Hage, an honest, godly man, 
who kept a tavern in the same town, called for burnt wine, 
sack, malmsey, hippocras, and what not. But Anthony Hage 
not being, though a landlord, a maltworm nor a member of 
the Licensed Victuallers' Protection Society — but being rather 
of the Lord Robert Grosvenor and "Wilson Patten persuasion, 
and perhaps afraid of the Swaben police — said they should 
have no wine till sermon-time had passed, and counselled them 
to go to church. But they all (save Adam Giebens, who said 
they might as well go if they could get no drink) said they 



PHILIP STUBBES. 259 

loathed that kind of exercise. The good host then, not giving 
them any -wine himself, nor suffering his barmaid to draw 
them any, went, as his duty did him bind, to church ; who, 
being gone, the abandoned, young Swabs fell (as is usual in 
Mr. Stubbes' stories) to banning and swearing, wishing the 
landlord might break his neck if ever he came again from the 
sermon ; and bursting forth into these intemperate speeches : 
the Deuce take us, if we depart hence this day without some 
wine. Straightway the Deuce appeared to them in the like- 
ness of a pot-boy, bringing in his hand a flagon of wine, and 
demanding of them if they caroused not .; he drank unto them, 
saying : " Good fellows be merrie " (a bold pot-boy), " for ye 
seem lusty lads." I suppose this salutation was a species of 
" Give your orders, gents," of the period ; and the orders being 
given, he added ; "I hope you will pay me well," which was, 
perhaps, equivalent to the dubiously-expressed hope of a 
modern waiter that it is " all right," when he has a tap-room 
fall of suspicious customers. The Swabs assured him that it 
was so far right, that they would gage their necks, bodies, 
and souls that the reckoning should be paid. Whereupon 
much wine was brought, and they fell to their old game of 
swyllying, gullying, and carousing, till no Swab could see 
another, and they were all as dronke as rats. At the last 
(they must have got tipsy very soon, or there must have been 
a very long sermon at Anthony Hage's place of worship), the 
Deuce, their host, told them that they " must neede paie the 
shotte," (I quote Stubbes literally), " whereat their hartes 
waxed cold." But the Deuce, comforting them, said : " Be of 
good cheer, for I want no money, and now you must drink hot 
boiling pitch, lead, and brimstone in the pit, with me for ever- 
more." Hereupon, immediately, he made their eyes like 
flames of fire, and in breadth as broad as« saucers. The Deuce 
then broke their necks in sonder, and when Anthony Hage 
came back from church there was nothing left in the taproom 
but several empty pots, a strong smell of brimstone, and the 
body of Adam Giebens, who was not dead, but in a fainting 
fit. It will be remembered that Adam was the Swab who said 
that he didn't mind going to church if he couldn't get any- 
thing to drink ; in consideration of which instance of practical 
piety he was spared by the demon pot-boy. 

s 2 



260 PHILIP STUBBES. 

It cannot fail to strike the reader that this wild story is a 
cousin-german to that of the Handsome Clearstarcher. Mr. 
Stubbes, too, seems fond of drawing his dismal legends from 
the copious stores of German diablerie. Having had his gird 
at drunkenness in these set terms, Philip Stubbes proceeds to 
demolish the landed gentlemen. Landlords, he says, make 
merchandise of their poor tenants, racking their rents, raising 
their fines and incomes, and setting them so strayt on the 
tenter-hooks that no man can live on them. And besides 
this, as though this pillage and pollage were not rapacious 
enough, they take in and enclose commons, moors, heaths 
whereout the poor commonaltie were wont to have all their 
forage and feeding for their cattle, and (which is more) corn 
for themselves to live upon ; all of which are in most places 
taken from them by these greedie puttockes [Have a care to 
thine ears, O Stubbes!] to the great impoverishing and utter 
beggaring of many towns and parishes, "whose tragical cryes 
and clamours have long pierced the skies, crying, ' How long, 
Lord, how long wilt thou defer to revenge this villany done 
to thy poor ? ' Take heed, then, you rich men, that poll and 
pill the poor, for the blood of as many as miscarry any man- 
ner of way through your injurious exactions, sinister oppres- 
sions and indirect dealings, shall be powred upon your heads 
at the great day of the Lord." 

As for lawyers, if you want to find vice and corruption in 
full bloom, you must go with Stubbes to Westminster Hall or 
the inns of court. But it is no use going there unless you are 
provided with good store of argent rabrum unguentum — red 
ointment, or gold, " to grease lawyers' fists withal ; " but if 
this be not forthcoming, then farewell client : he may go 
shoe the goose. The glimpse given to us of the progress of a 
lawsuit in Queen Bess's time is highly edifying, and has a 
strong family likeness to the lawsuits now well and truly tried 
before our Sovereign Lady the Queen at Westminster : — 
" Sheriffs and officers do return writs with a tarde venir, or 
with a non est inventus, to keep the poor man from his own. 
But so long as any of the red ointment is propping, they will 
bear him in hand ; his matter is good and just, and all to 
keep him in tow till all be gone, and then they will tell him 
his matter is naught ! In presence of their clients they will 



PHILIP STUBBES. 261 

be as earnest one with another as one (that knew not their 
sleights) would think they would go together by the ears. 
But directly their clients be gone, they laugh in their sleeves 
to think how prettily they can fetch in such sums of money, 
and that under the pretence of equity and justice." As to the 
lawyers themselves, they lead a happy life, like the Pope. 
They ruffle it out in their silks, velvets, and chains of gold. 
They keep a port like mighty potentates ; they have bands 
and retinues of men in attendance upon them daily ; they 
build gorgeous edifices and stately turrets ; they purchase 
lands and lordships. Is this not enough to make the mouths 
of all Chancery Lane water ? to awaken emotions of melan- 
choly envy of pallid and briefless barristers eating the tips of 
their fingers, and the covers of their law books, and the skin 
of their hearts, in studious, penniless, almost hopeless idle- 
ness ? Return again, ye golden times — ye auriferous 
Stubbesian days — when every stuff-gownsman wore a gold 
chain, and every Q.C. lived in a stately turret ; when judges 
were corrupt, and lord chancellors took " presents," and 
attorney-generals were to be " spoken to," like prosecutors in 
assault cases. 

There is this, I think, in favour of my Stubbes, that 
although severe, he is impartial. To use an expressive though 
inelegant metaphor, he tars everybody with the same brush. 
No sooner has he administered to the lawyers those sable 
trickling drops and penal plumes, by which Sydney Smith 
has poetised the somewhat prosaic operation of tarring and 
feathering, than he proceeds to attack the mercantile com- 
munity. The ' ' marchauntmen, by their marting, chaffering, 
and changing, by their counterfeit balances and untrue 
weights, and by their surprising of their wares (?), heap up 
infinite treasure. And this," Mr. Stubbes continues, "maketh 
things cleare." These avaricious marchauntmen have so 
" balaunced their chests that they crack again;" and so 
greedy grow they, that though overflowing with wealth, they 
will not scruple to take their neighbour's house over his head, 
long before his years are expired. And besides all this, " so 
desperately given are many, that for the acquiring of silver 
and gold, they will not scruple to imbrewe their hands " (on 
the sheep and lamb, or over-shoes over-boots principle, I 



262 PHILIP STUBBES. 

presume) ' ' in tlie blood of their own parents and friends most 
unnaturally." See what wonders civilisation has done in our 
time. In one respect, at least, we are superior to Stubbes. 
No grocers, tea-dealers, bakers, go about in our peaceful 
London streets, with their shirt-sleeves tucked up and butchers' 
knives in their hands, crying "Kill! kill!" to the great 
terror of their relations and acquaintances. No marchaunt- 
man murders now with sword or dagger, pistol or bludgeon. 
He murders in his Marting. He poisons the bowl. He puts 
grave-worms into the sugar-basin and aequo, tofana into the 
pickle-jar, and makes the wheaten loaf a Golgotha. He 
gathers his tea-leaves in the Valley of the Shadow of Death, 
and sounds the death trump in the blown-out vesicles of Nice 
White Veal, and tells cocoa that it is clay, and coffee that it 
is dust and ashes. And the higher marchauntman, the mer- 
chant-prince, the titled banker, he never murders now for 
silver or gold. Oh no ! He never embrewes his hands in the 
blood of parents and friends most unnaturally. Oh dear no ! 
He is contented with failing in a genteel, fashionable way, 
and killing widows and orphans and young children by the 
slow but sure process of ruin and misery and despair. No 
butcher's knife, or chopper, or pole-axe, no uprolled shirt- 
sleeves for your merchant-prince or titled banker ; but kills 
genteelly, murders his victim " as though he loved him," like 
that nobleman-executioner of the ancient regime, who, in the 
royalist reaction that in some provinces of France followed the 
Heign of Terror, condescended himself to massacre some 
Jacobin prisoners; but, tuait avec sa canne a pomme a" or, killed 
them with his gold-headed cane. 

Can no good come out of England. — Are we so irredeemably 
bad that Stubbes must be down on us continually. Is 
Stubbes merely an inveterate old grumbler, croaker, misan- 
thrope, mysogynist, and world-hater, or are we as drefrul 
wicked as Topsy ! Flying off at a tangent of indignation 
from covetousness and greed of wealth, he is furious against 
the assumption of titles. "The world is such," he says, 
"that he who hath much money enough shall be Rabbied 
and Maistered at every word, and withal saluted by the vain 
title of worshipful, though notwithstanding he be a muck- 
heap gentleman. And to such extreme madness is it grown, 






PHILIP STUBBES. 263 

that now-a-days every butcher, shoemaker, tailor, cobbler, 
and husbandman, nay, every tinker, pedler, and swineherd, 
every artificer, and other gregarii ordinis, of the vilest sort of 
men that be, must be called by the vaine name of maisters 
at every word." 

Eut this is but a transient puff, a trifling cap full of wind 
of Stubbes' anger. Soon the full current of his wrath is 
directed against the monster vice and corruption of the age — 
usury. He tells us plainly that money-lending at interest is 
murder. "The usurer killeth not one, but many; both house- 
band, wife, children, servants, family, and all, not sparing 
any. And if the poor man have not wherewith to pay, as 
well as the interest, then suit is commenced against him, 
outgo butterflies (?) and writs as thick as hail. So the poor 
man is apprehended, and being once convented, judgment 
condemnatory and definitive is pronounced against him, and 
then to Bocardo (the Fleet?) goeth he as round as a ball, 
where he is sure to lie until he rot one piece from another 
without satisfaction be made. O cursed caitiff ! no man, but 
a devil ; no Christian, but a cruel Tartarian, and merciless 
Turk . . ." but I cannot follow Stubbes any further; for he 
goes on pitching into the usurers for four closely-printed 
twelvemo pages of black letter. 

Hear Stubbes on the abuses of Sunday, and I will shut him 
up for good. Come hither and listen to Stubbes, you Maw- 
worms, Cantwells, Tartuffes, and over-righteous hypocrites 
of every grade and sect. Come hither Sir Joseph Surface, 
Bart., Lord Thomas Blifil, and Lord Viscount Sheepington 
(the family name is Wolf). Come hither all you 

" Whose chief devotion lies 
In odd, perverse, antipathies ; 
That with more care keep holyday 
The wrong than others the right way ; 
Still so perverse and opposite 
As if they worshipp'd God for spite." 

Listen all you who see crime in a Sunday pint of beer, per- 
dition in a Sunday newspaper, ruin in a Sunday cigar, and 
destruction in a Sunday razor-strop ; who think the Sabbath 
desecrated now, listen to how it was desecrated in the auri- 
ferous age and pious times of Queen Elizabeth. 



2G4 



PHILIP STUBBES. 



"Some spend the Sabaoth day," says ancient Stubbes, 
" in frequenting wicked plays and interludes, in maintaining 
Lords of Misrule (for so they call a certain kind of play which 
they use), in May games, church ales, feasts and wakesesses. 
In piping, dancing, dicing, carding, bowling, and tennis- 
playing. In bear-baiting, cock-fighting, hawking, and 
hunting. In keeping of fairs and markets on the Sabaoth. 
In keeping of court-leet, in football playing, and such-like 
devilish pastimes. In reading wicked books, in fencing and 
playing at staves and cudgels." 



QUEEN MAB; 

A CASE OF REAL DISTRESS. 



Royalty in decadence and adversity, although it may be 
occasionally magnanimous, is at all times a melancholy spec- 
tacle. A seedy prince, a duke out at elbows, a shabby 
lord even, are objects of pity and compassion ; but a bankrupt 
sovereign, a queen at a discount, a king "hard up," are, I 
take it, superlatively pitiable. Women, it is true, can bear 
adversity better than men. Without misery it would seem to 
be impossible for some of the dear creatures to " come out so 
strong" (to use a vulgar phrase) in the way of patience, of 
long suffering, of love, of mercy, of self-abnegation, as under 
the pressure of adverse circumstances. Marie Antoinette, we 
will wager, was ofttimes as cheerful while washing and comb- 
ing the little Dauphin (before he, poor child, was taken from 
her), in the gloomy donjon of the Temple, as she had been, in 
the days of her gloiy, in the golden galleries of Versailles. 
Queen Margaret, in the forest with her son, mollifying the 
robber, is a pleasanter sight to view than Queen Margaret the 
Cruel, an intriguing politician, decorating the Duke of York's 
head with a paper crown. Who would not sooner form unto 
himself an image of the Scottish Mary weeping in her first, 
innocent, French widowhood, or partaking of her last melan- 
choly repast at Fotheringay among her mourning domestics, 
than that same Scottish Mary battling with Ruthven for Rizzio's 
life, or listening in the grey morning for the awful sound 
which was to tell her that the deed of blood at the Kirk of 
Field was done, and that Henry Lord Darnley was dead ? 

Still for one Porphyrogenitus, as it were — born in the 
purple — lapped in the velvet of a throne, with an orb for a play- 
thing, and a sceptre for a lollipop, to come to poverty and 
meanness, to utter decay and loss of consideration — be he 
king, or be she queen — is very wretched and pity-moving to 



266 QUEEN MAB. 

view. Dionysius keeping school (and dwelling on the verb 
twpto, you may be sure) ; Boadicea widowed, scourged, dis- 
honoured, wandering up and down in search of vengeance ; 
Lear, old, mad, and worse than childish, in the forest; Zenobia 
ruined and in chains ; Darius 

" Deserted in his utmost need 
By those his former bounty fed ; " 

Theodore of Corsica filing his schedule in the Insolvency Deb- 
tors' Court ; Louisa, the lovely queen of Prussia, bullied bj r 
Napoleon ; Murat waiting for a file of grenadiers to dispatch 
him; for those who have once been "your majesty," before 
whom chamberlains have walked backward, to be poor, to be 
despised, to be forgotten, must be awful, should be instructive, 
is pitiable. 

A case of this description, and which I have been embold- 
ened to call one of real distress, has lately come under the 
notice of the writer of this article. He happens to be ac- 
quainted with a Queen, once powerful, once rich, once respected, 
once admired, whose dominions were almost boundless, the 
foundations of whose empire were certainly of antediluvian, 
and possibly of pre- Adamite date. Assyria, Babylon, Egypt, 
Phoenicia, Carthage, Borne, Greece, Macedon, were all baby 
dynasties compared with that of Queek Mab. 

Not always known under this title, perhaps, but still recog- 
nised in all time as a queen, as an empress, a sultana — the 
autocrat of imagination, the mistress of magic, the czarina of 
fancy, poetry, beauty — the queen of the fairies and fairyland. 

Her chronicles were writ with a diamond pen upon the 
wing of a butterfly, before ever Confucius had penned a line, 
or Egyptian hieroglyphics were thought of. She animated all 
nature when, for millions of miles, there had not been known 
one living thing, and there was nothing howling but the 
desert. She peopled the heavens, the air, the earth, the 
waters, with innumerable tribes of imaginary beings, arrayed 
in tints borrowed from the flowers, the rainbow, and the sun. 
She converted every virtue into a divinity, every vice into a 
demon. Far, far superior to mythology, her sovereignty was 
tributary only to religion. 

When Theseus reigned in Athens — let William Shakspeare 






QUEEN MAB. 267 



settle when — Queen Mab, under the name and garb of Titania, 
reigned lady paramount in all the woods and wilds near the 
city. She was wedded to one Oberon : of whose moral cha- 
racter, whatever people may say, I have always thought but 
very lightly. She knew a bank whereon the wild thyme grew ; 
she had a court of dancing fays and glittering sprites ; at her 
call, came from the brown forest glades, from the recesses of 
mossy banks, from the penetralia of cowslips' bells, from under 
the blossoms that hung on boughs, from where the bee sucked, 
from where the owls cried, from flying on bats' backs — satyrs 
and fauns, elves and elfins, naiads, dryads, hamadryads, bry- 
comanes, strange little creatures in skins and scales, with wings 
and wild eyes. And Oberon had but to wave his wand, and 
lo, the dewdrops and the glow-worms, and the will-o'-the- 
wisps gathered themselves together, and became a creature — 
that creature Puck — the mischief loving, agile, playful Puck, 
putting " a girdle round the earth in forty minutes," weaving 
subtle incantations upon Bully Bottom with the ass's head, or, 
with some million Puck-like sprites bearing glistening torches, 
singing in elfin chorus — 

" Through the house give glimmering light," 

and lighting up the vast marble palace of Theseus until Philo- 
stratus, lord high chamberlain and master of the revels, must 
have thought that his subordinates were playing the diable a 
guatre with his stores of " wax ends from the palace." This was 
Queen Mab — Titania — the fairy queen who reigned in the 
Piraeus and in the Morea, from Athens to Lacedsemon, from 
Thrace to Corinth. The bigwigs of Olympus recognised her ; 
Jupiter winked at her while his ox-eyed spouse had turned her 
bucolic glances another way. Pan was aware of her, and 
lent her his pipes ofttimes. Socrates knew her, and she con- 
soled him when his demon had been, tormenting him unmerci- 
fully. Not, however, to Greece did she confine herself. She 
winged her way with Bacchus to the hot climes of Indy when 
he became Iswara and Baghesa ; she sported on crocodiles' 
tails in Egypt when Bacchus once more changed himself into 
Osiris. She was a Sanscrit fairy when Bacchus became Vris- 
hadwaja. The stout bulrushes of old Nile, the gigantic palms 
of Indostan, the towering bamboos of China, quavered lightly 



268 QUEEN MAB. 

as the myriad elves of fairyland danced upon them. Wherever 
there was mythology, wherever there was poetry, wherever 
there was fancy, there was Queen Mab ; multi-named and 
multi-formed, but still queen of the beautiful, the poetical, the 
fanciful. 

The East was long her favourite abode. She hovered about 
Chinese marriage feasts, and blew out the light in variegated 
lanterns; she sat on Chinese fireworks, let off squibs and 
crackers, and pasted wafers upon Mandarins' spectacles, thou- 
sands of years before lanterns, fireworks, or spectacles were 
ever heard or thought of in this part of the globe. When 
the whole of Europe was benighted and in gloom, she — Queen 
Mab, as the Fairy Peribanou — was giving that gorgeous 
never-to-be-forgotten series of evening parties known as the 
Arabian Nights' Entertainments. She had castles of gold, 
silver, brass, and precious stones ; of polished steel, and ada- 
mant, and glass. She had valleys of diamonds and mountains 
of sapphires. In her stud were flying horses, with tails that 
whisked your eyes out ; mares that had once been beautiful 
women. In her aviaries were rocs whose eggs were as large 
as Mr. Wyld's Globe; birds that talked, and birds that 
danced, and birds that changed into princes. In her ponds 
were fishes that refused to be fried in egg and bread-crumb, 
or, in the Hebrew fashion, in Florence oil, but persisted in 
holding astoundingly inexplicable converse with fairies, who 
came out of party-walls and defied Grand Viziers ; fishes that 
eventually proved to be — not fishes — but the mayor, cor- 
poration, and burgesses of a highly respectable submerged 
city. From them doubtless sprang, in after ages, the suscep- 
tible oyster that was crossed in love, and subsequently whistled ; 
and the accomplished sturgeon (I think) that smoked a pipe 
and sang a comic song. In those golden Eastern days the 
kingdom or queendom of Fairyland was peopled with one- 
eyed-calenders, sons of kings, gigantic genii who for countless 
ages had been shut up in metal caskets hermetically sealed ; 
and who, being liberated therefrom by benevolent fishermen, 
began in smoke (how many a genius has ended in the same !), 
and finally assuming their primeval proportions, threatened 
and terrified their benefactors. In the train of the Arabian 
Queen Mab, were spirits who conveyed hunchbacked bride- 



QUEEN MAB. 269 

grooms into remote chambers, and there left them, head 
downwards ; there were fairies who transported lovers in their 
shirts and drawers to the gates of Damascus, and there 
incited them to enter the fancy-baking trade, bringing them 
into sore peril in the long run, through not putting pepper 
into cream tarts ; there were cunning magicians, knowing of 
gardens underground, where there were trees whereof all the 
fruits were jewels, and who went up and down Crim Tartary 
crying " Old lamps for new;" there were palaces, built, 
destroyed, and rebuilt in an instant ; there were fifty thousand 
black slaves with jars of jewels on their heads ; there were 
carpets which flew through the air, caps which rendered their 
owners invisible, loadstones which drew the nails out of ships, 
money which turned to dry leaves, magic pass -words which 
caused the doors of subterranean caverns to revolve on their 
hinges. Yes ; and the Eastern Queen Mab could show you 
Halls of Eblis, in which countless multitudes for ever wan- 
dered up and down ; black marble staircases, with never a 
bottom ; paradises where Gulchenrouz revelled, and for which 
Bababalouk sighed ; demon dwarfs with scimitars, the inscrip- 
tions on whose blades baffled the Caliph Vathek, and who 
(the dwarfs), being menaced and provoked, rolled themselves 
up into concentric balls, and suffered themselves to be kicked 
into interminable space. Queen Mab held her court in 
Calmuck Tartary ; and there, in the Relations of Ssidi Kur, 
yet extant, she originated marvellous stories of the wandering 
Khan; of the glorified Naugasuna Garbi, who was "radiant 
within and without ;" of the wonderful bird Ssidi, who came 
from the middle kingdom of India ; of wishing -caps, flying- 
swords, hobgoblins, and fairies in abundance. In the East, 
Whittington and his Cat first realised their price ; it rested in 
Italy on its way northward ; and the merry priest Piovano 
Aiiotto had it from a benevolent Brahmin, and told it in 
Florence before there was ever a Lord Mayor in London. The 
King of the Frogs — that of Doctor Leyden and the Brothers 
Grimm — was a tributary of Queen Mab in Lesser Thibet, 
centuries ago ; and the fact of the same story being found in 
the Gesta Romanorum, and in the popular superstitions of 
Germany, only proves the universality of Queen Mab's do- 
minion. It is no proof that, because Queen Mab's fays and 



270 QUEEN MAB. 

goblins hovered about the rude incantations of Scandinavian 
mythology, they were not associated likewise in the One 
awful and mysterious monosyllable of the Hindu Triad. 

Before Queen Mab came to be a " case of real distress," 
she was everywhere. She and her sprites played their fairy 
games with Bramah and Vishnu, and with the Ormuzd of the 
Zendavesta. Her stories were told in Denmark, where the 
trold-folk celebrated her glories. The gib-cat eating his bread 
and milk from the red earthenware pipkin of Goodman Platte, 
and in deadly fear of Knune-Marre, is the same Scottish gib- 
cat that so rejoiced when Mader Watt was told that " auld 
Girnegar o' Craigend, alias Rumble-grumble, was dead." 
The Norman Fabliaux of the Poor Scholar, the Three Thieves, 
and the Sexton of Cluni, are all of Queen Mab's kindred in 
Scotland. The German tales of the Wicked Goldsmith, the 
Talking Bird, and the Eating of the Bird's Heart, were 
Avritten in Queen Mab's own book of the Fable of Sigurd, 
delighted in by those doughty Scandinavian heroes, Thor and 
Odin. A corresponding tradition has been seized upon by 
that ardent lover of Queen Mab, Monsieur Perrault, in his 
story of the Sleeping Beauty in the Wood. The Golden 
Goose we have read and laughed at when told us by the 
Brothers Grimm in their Kinder -mar chen, is but the tale well 
known to Queen Mab, of Loke hanging on to the Giant Eagle, 
for which you may consult (though I daresay you won't) the 
Volsunga Saga, or the second part of the edition of Resenius. 
Monk Lewis's hideous tale of the Grim White Woman, in 
which the spirit of the child whistles to its father : 



pew-wew — pew-wew 



My Minny he stew," 

is but the nether- Saxon tale of the Machandel Boom or the 
Holly Tree. " My Minny he stew " is but 

" Min moder de mi scMacht, 
Min Vater de mi att." 

The Queen Mab records of the Countess d' Aunois delighted 
children whose fathers' fathers had anticipated their delight 
hundreds of years before, in the Pentamerone of Giovan' 
Battista Basile. The Moorish tales of Melendo the man-eater h 



QUEEN MAE. 271 

were known of old to the Welsh, and are recorded in their 
Mabinogion, or Myvyrian Archaeology. The boguey of our 
English nursery was found in Spain in the days of Maricas- 
tana ; and, under the guise of a horse without a head, he yet 
haunts the Moorish ramparts of the Alhanibra, in company 
with another nondescript beast with a dreadful woolly hide, 
called the Belludo. Belludo yet haunts Windsor Forest as 
I Heme the Hunter. I hear his hoarse growl, awful to little 
children, in the old streets of Rouen, where he is known as 
the Gargouille. I have seen him — at least I have seen those 
I who have seen him — as the headless hen of Dumbledown- 
deary. 

I count as Queen Mab's subjects and as part of her domi- 
nions, all persons and lands not strictly mythological, but only 
fanciful. Homer, Virgil, Ovid and Company, may keep Mount 
1 Olympus, the ox-eyed Juno, the zoned Venus, the limping 
Vulcan, the nimble-fingered Mercury for me. I envy not 
Milton his " dreaded name of Demogorgon," his Satans, 
Beelzebubs, Molochs, his tremendous allegories of Sin and 
Death. Queen Mab has no sympathy with these. Nay, nor 
for Doctor Johnson's ponderous supernaturals (fairies in full- 
; ! bottomed wigs and buckles), his happy valleys of Abyssinia, 
1 many-pillared palaces, and genii spouting aphorisms full of 
. morality and latinity. Nay, and Queen Mab has nought to do 
i with courtly Joseph Addison and his academic vision of Mirza, 
where the shadowy beings of Mahometan fancy seem turned 
i ; into trochees and dactyls. Queen Mab never heard of Exeter 
1 Hall ; and never made or encouraged dense platform elo- 
quence. I claim for Queen Mab that she once — alas ! once 
I — possessed the whole realm and region of fairy and goblin 
fiction throughout the world, civilised and uncivilised. I 
> claim as hers the fairies, ghosts, and goblins of William 
Shakespeare ; Prospero with his rough magic, the beast 
Caliban, the witch Sycorax, the dainty Ariel, and the whole 
of the Enchanted Island. I claim as hers Puck, Peas-blossom, 
and Mustard-seed. As hers, Puckle, Hecate, the little little 
d airy spirits, the spirits black white and grey, the whole goblin 
it -corps of the Saturnalia in Macbeth. These were wicked sub- 
i jects of the Queen of Fairyland — rebellious imps ; but they 
I were hers. I likewise claim as hers, all the witches, man- 

I 



272 QUEEN MAB. 

eaters, lavandeuses, brucolaques, loup-garous, pusses-in-boots, 
talking birds, princes changed into beasts, white cats, giant- 
killers (whether Jacks or no), dragon-quellers, and champions, 
that never existed. Likewise, all and every the Bevis's, 
Arthurs, dun cows, demon dwarfs, banshees, brownies (of 
Bodestock or otherwise), magicians, sorcerers, good people, 
uncanny folk, elves, giants, tall black men, wolves addicted to 
eating grandmammas and grandchildren, communicative fish 
(whether with rings or otherwise), ghoules, afrits, genii, peris, 
djinns, calenders, hobgoblins, " grim worthies of the world," 
ogres with preternatural olfactory powers, paladins, dwergars, 
Robin Goodfellows, and all other supernatural things and 
persons. 

And preferring these great claims — howsoever wise we 
grow, are they not great after all ! — of Queen Mab's, to the 
general respect, I present Her Majesty as a case of real dis- 
tress. She has been brought very low indeed. She is sadly 
reduced. She has hardly a shoe to stand upon. Boards, 
Commissions, and Societies, grimly educating the reason, and 
binding the fancy in fetters of red tape, have sworn to destroy 
her. Spare her ; spare her, Mr. Cole ; spare her, ye Poly- 
technics and Kensington Museums, for you ride your hobbies 
desperately hard ! 



THE OLD MAGICIAN; 

ANOTHER CASE OF REAL DISTRESS. 

[ 

Whether from the realms of Magic, self brought, or per- 
chance, by some involuntary intuitive Abracadabra of my 
i own accidentally invoked ; whether from the musty recesses 
of my old books in the dusty, legendary corner yonder, or 
j whether merely from those innermost chambers of the brain, 
whither the soul strays, ofttimes, to seek for that which never 
was ; whether from all, or any, or none of these haunts, still 
I there came, lately, and sat down over against me, the old 
Magician. He had nor white beard, nor wand, nor cabalistic 
i figures inscribed on his dress ; he did not smell sulphureous, 
i nor did my lamp burn blue at his approach. Yet he was a 
. presence, in which was power and wisdom and knowledge, 
j and an importunity of charm to which the deafest adder must 
have listened, perforce. And there came out of him a voice, 
mildly saying : I am that false belief, as old almost as true belief, 
and, though false, not incompatible with the existence of my 
veracious brother. I am that superstition, or fancy, or imagi- 
nation, or fiction, as you, in your clemency or severity, may 
call me, which you have dwelt upon and cherished and 
nourished against your reason, against your convictions, against 
your experience. 

Unembodied as I am (thus continued the old Magician), 
I yet take interest in the doings of the material world. I 
peruse, not unfrequently, the hebdomadal productions of the 
press, and among other periodicals I often see the one to which 
you contribute. Inflated with conceit, and blinded by opinia- 
tiveness, you lately undertook to commiserate and to point out 
as a Case of Real Distress, one Mab or Mabel, a shiftless jade, 
calling herself Queen of the extinct kingdom of Fairyland — a 
kingdom recently blotted out from the map by the united 
efforts of the March of Intellect, Transatlantic Go-a-headism, 



274 THE OLD MAGICIAN. 

and the Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge. You 
said, truly, that Queex Mab had not a shoe to stand upoD, 
that she was brought very low, that she was sadly reduced. 
I admit all that. The nonsensical kingdom of Fairyland is 
deservedly dismembered, and its subjects relegated to the 
ballets and burlesques of the London theatres, there to wave 
branches of red foil, and smile — while their hearts ache — 
for fourteen shillings a week, finding their own shoes and 
stockings. But, my son (the Magician became familiar), you 
have enormously exaggerated the power and influence of Queen 
Mab. You have ascribed to her territories and vassals she 
never possessed, and that never were, in the remotest degree, 
tributary to her. You gave her as lieges, demons, dwarfs, 
dragons, dwergars, horrible spectres and creations that belong 
only unto me — the Magician. You have, not of malice I 
hope, but inadvertently, confounded the kingdom of Fairy- 
land with the far more (once) potent, far more distressed, far 
more reduced kingdom of Magic. I am the " case of real 
distress." I am the Magician without a shoe to stand on. 
My glory is departed — mine, Ichabod the Magician. 

Before faydom existed, was Magic, awful, erect, weird, 
inscrutable. Magic stood in the dark cave of Endor, when 
the ghost of Samuel trembled in the lurid air, and scared 
Saul's eyeballs. When the Israelites wandered in the desert 
my Magicians held dark and fearsome sway in the wicked 
lands of Canaan. They presided over the ghastly rites of 
Moloch ; they wrought enchantments among the Amalekites, 
the Amorites, the Jebusites, and the Hittites. In Judsea, in 
Persia, in Chaldasa, my Magic, my Magicians, worked signs 
and wonders (false but fearful) through long ages. Wise 
men, soothsayers, sorcerers, and astrologers, were in the 
trains of mighty kings, of Darius the Mede, and Nebuchad- 
nezzar the king. Throughout the broad miles-long streets 
of Nineveh and Babylon; by the arched terraces; under 
the hanging gardens; in the courts of marble palaces; 
by the myriad-hued tablets on the wall of strong warriors 
and fair youths such as Aholibah sighed for ; in the midst of 
the motley, bright arrayed, swarthy, strong bearded throng, 
stalked my Magicians, and their incantations were blended 
with the wars of Ninus, and the orgies of Semiramis, and the 



THE OLD MAGICIAN. 275 

conspiracies of the captains and the liturgies of the priests. 
, When Bdshazzar the king drunk deep with his lords, and 
, praised the gods of gold, and brass, and iron, and wood, 
; and when in the same hour there came forth fingers of a 
1 man's hand, and wrote — over against the candlestick upon 
i the plaster of the wall of the king's palace — words which 
none could understand, did the king bethink himself in his 
I need of light inconsequential fairies ? No : he cried aloud 
i for the astrologers, the Chaldaeans, the soothsayers — the wise 
i men of Babylon. And though we, the wise men, could not 
' read the interpretation or wis that the Medes and Persians 
, were at the gate, yet we only ceded to One, whom the king 
, Nebuchadnezzar had made master of all the Magicians, 
! astrologers, Chaldseans, and soothsayers in the kingdom. 
! Magic was vanquished, but still recognised. 

You have spoken of Queen Mab's sway in Egypt, and of her 
' myriad elves sporting upon the tails of crocodiles. Sir, you 
I are impertinent. Let Queen Mab and her fairies disport 
themselves in frivolous Persia and enervated Arabia; but 
leave the land of Egypt — that long, narrow, dusky land of 
wonders — to me, the king of magic and mysticism. Where 
that gigantic enigma, the Sphynx, rears its dim, battered, 
mysterious, time-worn, yet time-defying head, against the 
copper sky, and amidst the shifting sand ; where the river of 
Nile reflects — 

" the endless length 
Of dark red colonnades," 

I where religion was philosophy, and philosophy religion ; yet 
where the purest doctrines of metaphysics were mingled with 
the grossest forms of Zoroastianism and the brutifying 
worship of beasts and reptiles and vegetables, and the 
profoundest morality was grafted upon the rudest and most 

: debasing African fetichism ; where phantom hieroglyphics 
shadow forth the dim creed that the soul, after its three 

; thousand years' cycle of metempsychosis or rather metenso- 

Imatosis, shall return to its human envelope again; and 
where the spirits of kings, and princes, and priests, are 
pourtrayed migratory through the bodies or swine, and birds 
that fly, and reptiles that crawl — there I and Magic dwelt. 

t 2 



276 THE OLD MAGICIAN. 

Mine was Fetichism and Zoroastianism. Magic had no 
sympathy with the light Bacchus in his convivial, his joyous, 
his saltatory form. Queen Mab, or Queen Ariadne, or Queen 
Anybody, may sport with him in Naxos, and the sunny isles 
of the Archipelago ; may press the red grape for him, and 
hold the golden chalice to his eager lips. But Bacchus, as 
Osiris, the awful Lord of Anienti, belongs not to Fairyland, 
but to the realm of Magic and to me. My Magicians sat at 
his feet, when, as he is painted in the royal tombs of Biban 
el Moluk, he sits pro tribunal, weighing the souls that have 
just departed from the bodies in the fatal scales of Amenti, 
and judging them according to their deserts. The Magicians 
were at home in Egypt. When, as the legend of Manetho 
tells us, the great pyramid was built by King Suphis, the 
Magicians stood by and aided the work with their spells. 
When that king Pharaoh who knew not Joseph or his people 
was so sorely beset by the plagues raised by the indomitable 
brothers of Israel, did not he call upon his Magicians for 
aid ? Did not their magic lore stand them in such stead that 
their rods all produced serpents, albeit Aaron's rod, through 
a power that was preter-magical, swallowed them all up 
eventually ? As year after year and age after age rolled 
their sternly succeeding waves over the land of Egypt, and 
as the remorselessly advancing and receding tide brought 
from the womb of time the myriad pebbles of mortality, and 
carried them back into the abyss of eternity, Magic was left 
high and dry — a monument and a misleading Pharos, 
inscrutably cabalistic and existent as the pillar of Pompey, 
and the needle of Cleopatra, and the obelisk of Luxor. 

Came the soft sons of Syria with the rich dyes of Tyre and 
enervating arts. Came the luxurious Greeks, and gave 
plasticity and symmetry to the bizarre, yet awful sculptures 
of the Egyptian Pantheon. The muscular fauns, the brawny 
Hercules, the slim Adonis, the cested Venus, the crested 
Diana, came to teach the limners and sculptors of Egypt 
how to cast their deities in the moulds of Zeuxis and 
Praxiteles. But the Sphynx looked coldly on in her 
tmchangeable, enigmatical beauty, and the Magicians stood 
by, unchangeable too, their arms folded, gazing with a frown 
half of anger, half of contempt, at the clumsy legerdemain of 



THE OLD MAGICIAN. 277 

Paganism, at the boggling tricks of the haruspices and the 
transparent cheatery of the oracle. " These priests of 
Bacchus and Venus," they thought, " are mere buffoons and 
tricksters, wretched ventriloquists, miserable experts at sleight 
of hand and cogging of dice." Came the Romans, and 
with them the loud prating augurs, and the bragging sooth- 
sayers, and those that dealt in omens and prophecies. But 
the Magicians who had wrought magic for the Ptolemies 
laughed these clumsy bunglers to scorn. When Pompey, 
Csesar, Antony, told them of the supernatural wonders of 
Greece and Rome; of the ghastly priests who reigned 
beneath the deep shadow of Aricia's trees, 

" The priest "who slew the slayer, 
And shall himself he slain ; " 

of the thirty chosen prophets, the wisest in the land, who 
evening and morning stood by Lars Porsenna of Clusium; 
of the strange visions of pale women with bleeding breasts 
that Sextus Tarquinius saw in the night season; of the 
Pythoness on her tripod, and the Cumsean Sibyl in her cave ; 
the Magicians of Egypt pointed to the Sphynx, the pyramids, 
the hieroglyphics, saying : " Construe us these, and unriddle 
us these. Liars, and boasters, and whisperers through chinks 
in the wall, and fumblers among the entrails of beasts, can 
ye call, as we can, serpents from the hard ground, and cause 
them to dance to the notes of the cithara and the timbrel ? 
Can ye foretell life and death, and change men into beasts and 
reptiles, and show in a drop of water the images of men 
that are dead, and great battles fought long ago ? " 

The proud conquerors of Egypt bowed to Egypt's sooth- 
sayers. The Magician was welcome in Cleopatra's palace. 
He boasted that he could read in " Nature's infinite book of 
sorcery ; " Iras, Alexas, Enobarbus, listened to him, and he 
foretold truly that one should outlive the lady whom he 
loved, and that another should be more beloving than beloved. 
The Magician stood in Cleopatra's galley beside the proud and 
stately queen, — the " serpent of old Nile," that was " with 
Phoebus' am'rous pinches black;" in the galley that burned 
in the water like burnished gold ; the galley with purple sails 
and silver oars ; with a pavilion cloth of gold of tissue ; the 



278 THE OLD MAGICIAN. 

galley whereof the gentlewomen were like the Nereides, on 
each side of which stood pretty dimpled boys like smiling 
cupids ; the galley steered by a seeming mermaid ; the galley 
with silken tackle, and from which a strange invisible perfume 
hit the sense of the adjacent wharves. And when Antony 
lay dead, and the proud land of Egypt lay at the feet of 
Octavius Caesar, the ominous finger of the soothsayer pointed 
to the basket of figs and the ''pretty worm of Xilus " — the 
deadly asp, the baby at the breast of Cleopatra that sucked 
the nurse asleep. 

Ages of youth have not been able to efface the Magic from 
the Egyptian surface. Its edge has been blunted, as the 
characters in the hieroglyphics have been, some rounded and 
chipped, some choked up with sand and dust. But the ruins 
of Magic yet exist like the ruins of temples and statues. The 
rage of the heathen Saracens, the iconoclastic theology of 
centuries of Mohammedan sway, have battered, have defaced, 
have devastated the caryatides that supported the frieze of the 
temple of Egyptian Magic ; but the temple and the caryatides 
are erect still. The fires that destroyed the stored-up learning 
of Alexandria have been impotent to quench it ; the devas- 
tating hoofs of the steeds of the Mamelukes and the Beys 
have not trampled it under foot ; Buonaparte's hordes, fired 
by revolutionary and subversive frenzy, could not annihilate 
it ; the glamour of the East vanquished the atheism of the 
"West, and the Egyptian seer warned Kleber, though unavail- 
ingly, of the dagger that was to lay him low. Even now, in 
this age — in this nineteenth century — when English cadets 
and judges of Sudder Adawlut jolt in omnibuses across the 
Isthmus of Suez ; when steamers have coal depots at Alex- 
andria ; when Cairo has European hotels with table dliotes and 
extortionate waiters ; when the sandy desert is strewn, not 
with the bones of men slain in fight, or with the ruins of 
bygone empires, but with the crumbs of ham sandwiches and 
the corks of soda-water bottles; when the "cruel lord" who 
reigns over Egypt drives an English curricle ; when a staff of 
English engineers view Thebes and Memphis through theodo- 
lites, and talk of gradients and inclines, tunnels, cuttings, and 
embankments through the valley of the Xile, — Magic and 
Magicians hold their own in the sunburnt land of Egypt. In 



THE OLD MAGICIAN. 279 

some dark street of Cairo still is tlie traveller introduced 
to the seer, fallen indeed from his high estate, with dimi- 
nished credit, and circumscribed empire over things magical, 
still versed in " Nature's infinite book of sorcery." No longer 
the proud confidant of princes and monarchs, the explicator of 
enigmas, the unraveller of mysteries, the expounder of dreams 
and visions of the night, he is but a meanly- clad old man, 
with a long beard and a filthy turban swathed round his head. 
But still he pours into the palm of the youthful acolyte the 
mystic pool of ink, and traces around it the magic characters 
which none may read but he. And still the boy, at his 
command, sees in the inky mirror " the figure of one sweep- 
ing," and after him are mirrored in the pool, as the traveller 
summons them, the portraits of the mighty dead, or the 
friends or dear ones at home. And though sometimes the 
Magician may err, and Lord Nelson present himself with two 
arms, and Miss Biffin with both arms and legs, and Daniel 
Lambert as a thin man, and Shakespeare with a cocked hat 
and spectacles, you must ascribe that to its being Ramadan, 
or the boy not being a proper medium, or yourself not properly 
susceptible to magical influences. 

I have said enough, I perpend, Scholar (continued this gar- 
rulous old Magician), to show you that in Egypt, at least, my 
empire is of a date superlatively more ancient than that of 
your vaunted Queen Mab. If you doubt me, go ask, go search 
the works of those conscientious ghoules among the graves 
of Egyptian antiquities — Rosellini, Grsevius, Lane, Denon, 
Champollion, Belzoni, Wilkinson — go 'to the fountain-head, 
the father of history — Herodotus. Go ask that famous 
student of the black art in your own times — Caviglia — he 
who, from the three corner stones of astrology, magnetism, 
and magic, raised a pyramid of the most extraordinary 
mysticism, on whose airy faces he could see inscribed in letters 
of light invisible to all but himself elucidatory texts : he who 
was the last recipient of that rich but awful legacy of 
mystical learning which has been handed down from age 
to age — from the Essenes to Philo the Jew, from Pythagoras 
to Psamnadius; he who, from the constant and engrossing 
study of the mysteries of the pyramids became (like those 
Cingalese insects that take the shape and colour of the leaf 



280 THE OLD MAGICIAN. 

they feed on) himself in dress, feature, manner, thought and 
language, absolutely pyramidal. 

But I have not done with you yet, Novice, nor have I 
vindicated the claims of Magic sufficiently. You shall leap 
with me o'er centuries. I willingly resign to Queen Mab 
and her fairies the era of Sultan Haroun Al'Raschid, the silly, 
sparkling, spangled enchantments of Bagdad, and Damascus, 
and China, nay, even the fairy doings in my own Egypt — 
my own grand Cairo — during the sway of the Caliphs. I 
look upon her trivial pranks with calenders, and caravans, 
and fair Persians; her peris, genii, and dwarfs, just as so 
many conjuring tricks and mountebanks at a fair. She may 
have the whole of the dark and middle ages (in the East) for 
me, and plague or reward as she list the enervated occupants 
of Moslemin harems or the effete princes of the Lower Empire. 
Europe was my field of sovereignty then, and the realm of 
Magic held its own against the realm of Fairyland there for ages. 

I will take Puck. You have been bold enough, sir, to 
claim that essential vassal of the king of Magic as a fairy. 
You will quote, of course, the authority of William Shake- 
speare (a fellow so ignorant of geography that he talks about 
the sea-coast of Bohemia), who makes Puck a sort of fairy 
tiger or "gyp" to Oberon, putting a girth round about the 
earth in forty minutes, and bragging with disgusting egotism 
of his flying " straight as an arrow from a Tartar's bow." 
You will have seen, doubtless, also, the Midsummer Night's 
Dream at Govent Garden Theatre under the management of 
Madame Yestris, and probably because you saw therein Miss 
Marshall as Puck, looking very fairy-like in a short tunic and 
fleshings ; or perchance saw pasted on the green-room pier- 
glass a prompter's "call" for "Puck and all the fairies at 
twelve," you jumped at the conclusion that Puck was a fairy. 
He is nothing at all of the sort. The fellow is a hobgoblin, 
and belongs to me. Let Mab rule her own roast of sylphides, 
coryphees, fays, and sprites, and not meddle with me. I will 
quote chapter and verse for it. 

11 In John Milesius any man may read 
Of divels in Sarmatia honoured, 
Called Kotri or Kobaldi, such as we 
Pugs and hobgoblins call " 



THE OLD MAGICIAN. 281 

Thus writes old Heywood in his Lucifugi. Pug, or Puck, is a 
hobgoblin, a divel, and, as such, I do not think the sportive 
Queen of Elf-land will be inclined to claim him. in future. 
Indeed, many learned theologians — both Catholic and Pro- 
testant — have gone far to prove, by texts and arguments, both 
from Scripture and the Fathers, that Puck is no other than 
Satan himself in various disguises. Such was Pack who had 
a domicile in the monastery of the Greyfriars at Mechlenburg- 
Schwerin, which he haunted in the form of a pug or monkey, 
and tormented the monks and lay brethren sorely. He had his 
fits of good humour sometimes certainly, and turned the spit, 
baked the bread, drew the wine, and cleaned the kitchen, while 
the inmates of the monastery lay a-snoring, receiving as wages 
two brass pots and a parti-coloured jacket to which a bell was 
appended ; but these benevolent humours were transitory and 
capricious ; and he is truly described by the monk to whom 
we owe the V&ridica Relatio do Demonio Puck, as an impure 
spirit. In fact (and you will excuse the freedom of my lan- 
guage, for, though I am a Magician, I am a gentleman, and 
would not wish to wound your ears unnecessarily), Puck was a 
very devil. Do not misconstrue me. I don't mean -the devil 
who was always requiring to be paid, and for whom there 
was no pitch hot ; the devil who taught Jack of Kent bridge- 
building, on condition that a certain post obit should be paid 
if Jack was buried on land or in water, and was cheated out 
of his bond by Jack causing himself to be buried in the key- 
stone of his last bridge ; the devil who patronised old Nostra- 
damus, and was in a somewhat similar manner to the Jack 
ruse, cheated — he having a contingent reversion in Nostra- 
damus, which was to fall in if that worthy was buried within 
a church or without a church, whereupon Nostradamus left 
directions in his will "to be put into a hole in a wall," which 
was accordingly done, to the devil's discomfiture. Puck is 
not the devil whom Banagher beat ; the devil who assisted 
(for a consideration) the architect of the cathedral of Cologne ; 
the devil who raised the Lust-Berg at Aix-la-Chapelle, and 
had a finger in most of the castles on the banks of the Rhine ; 
the devil of Evreux, who migrated from thence to Caen, and 
appeared there in 1818 clad in white armour, and attacked 
the commandant of the town in a cul-de-sac. 



282 THE OLD MAGICIAN. 

Puck is not the devil with a glossy black skin, saucer eyes,. 
horns, hoofs, a tail, and a pitchfork, who was vanquished by 
St. Cuthbert, and many other saints, as recorded by learned 
hagiologists ; who was associated with Tom Walker in that 
peculiarly disadvantageous partnership (for Tom), recorded by 
Washington Irving ; who carries off Don Juan in the panto- 
mime; who is generally associated with the idea of blue 
flames, sulphur, brimstone, and red-hot Wallsend. And, O 
Neophyte, Puck is not the awful fiend of Milton, stretched on 
a burning lake, floating "many a rood; " the arch spirit of 
Evil, who, amidst agonies which cannot be conceived without 
horror, deliberates, resolves, and executes, whose fiendish 
spirit stands unbroken " against the sword of Michael, against 
the thunder of Jehovah, against the flaming lake, against the 
marl burning with solid fire, against the prospect of an eter- 
nity of unintermittent misery." He is not the Ata/BoXos of 
the Greek — the demon of iEschylus, the Prometheus, half- 
fiend, half-redeemer, the friend of man, the sullen and impla- 
cable enemies of heaven. He is not one of the chattering, 
bestial, grinning, mopping herd of devils, bloated with meat 
and winej and reeling in ribald dances, who stagger and leap 
round the lady in the Masque of Comus ; he is not one of the 
inexorable spirits who hover in the silence and gloom of 
Dante's Inferno, who point pitilessly to the hopeless inscrip- 
tion above the portal, who watch inflexibly the agonies of 
Ugolino, and the remorse of Francesca, and Facinata writhing^ 
in her burning tomb. Puck is not The Devil, but a devil — 
a diabloiin. He is a very monkey, a mischievous ape, having 
a special delight in the annoyance of saints and hermits. The 
writings of the Fathers are full of authentic relations of his 
knavish tricks. 'Twas he who tempted Saint Anthony (pace 
Thomas Ingoldsby) ; 'twas he who 

sat in an earthen pot, 



In a big bellied earthen pot sat he," 

and with a rabble rout of devils with tails and devils without, 
devils stout and meagre, devils serious and jocund, church- 
going devils and revel-haunting devils, endeavoured first in 
his own proper likeness as a hobgoblin, and afterwards as a 
laughing woman with two black eyes — the worst devil of all 



THE OLD MAGICIAN. 283 

— to decoy the Saint from the perusal of the holy book. This 
devil it was who, as Saint Benedict was saying his prayers on 
Monte Casino, did (according to Saint Gregory) appear to him 
in the likeness of a doctor riding upon a mule, avowing his 
intention to physic the whole convent, although, if we are to 
believe other accounts, it was to Saint Melanius that he 
appeared in this medical guise. Whichever way it was, how- 
ever, Saint Benedict had the mischievous little devil on the 
hip on a subsequent occasion. There was a certain monk in 
the convent, who somewhat after the style of our old acquaint- 
ance Daddy Longlegs, couldn't or wouldn't say his prayers. 
After praying a little while he always rose up suddenly and 
vamosed out of the oratory, as though the devil was at his 
heels ; — which indeed he was, as you shall hear. The monks 
told the prior, and the prior told the abbot, and the abbot 
told Saint Benedict of the non-praying brother's irreverent 
conduct; and in goes the Saint to the oratory, with a big 
walking-stick, just as the monk is coming out as usual. " See 
ye not who leadeth our brother ? " says Saint Benedict to 
Father Maurus and Pompeianus the prior. 

" We see nought," they answer. 

"I do," says the Saint, directing a meaning and somewhat 
menacing look towards his subordinates. " I see plainly a little 
black devil lugging violently at our brother's gown, and lead- 
ing him towards the door." 

The obtuse Pompeianus still persisted in seeing nothing ; 
but Father Maurus, who was in training to be a saint, and 
had besides an eye to the reversion of the prior's berth, imme- 
diately declared that he saw the devil, and that he was very 
little and very black. 

" Of course," says Saint Benedict. " Perhaps, Brother 
Pompeianus, when you have administered to yourself the seven 
score stripes I now prescribe to you, and said the four Greek 
epistles which you will be good enough to repeat to me with- 
out book to-morrow morning, you will be able to see the devil 
too. In the meantime, he must be exorcised from the person of 
our dear brother ;" whereupon whack ! whack ! whack ! goes 
the big walking-stick about the legs, head, back, and shoulders 
of the dear brother, till, as Saint Benedict declares, the little 
devil is completely exorcised, and the dear brother is covered 



Q84 THE OLD MAGICIAN. 

with bruises. The legend adds that the D. B. was ever after- 
wards distinguished for his remarkable assiduity of attendance 
and attention at matins, complins, and vespers. 

This little devil of Puck's kindred, if not Puck himself, was 
evidently the same who lay in wait so many years in order to 
bring to shame the chaste and pious Saint Gudule. It was 
the custom of this noble maiden to rise at cockcrow every 
morning, and walk to church with her maid before her carry- 
ing a lantern. What did the devil, but blow the candle out ? 
What did Saint Gudule, but blow it in again by her prayers ? 
And this is her standard miracle. Then there was a St. 
Erituis, who, you must know, was clerk or deacon to St. 
Martin. One day, while his principal was performing mass, 
St. Brituis saw a sly little devil behind the altar, busily em- 
ployed in writing on a strip of parchment as long as an 
hotel bill, all the sins of the congregation. There were a 
good many sins that day both of omission and commission, 
and the devil's parchment was soon full on both sides, and 
crossed and re-crossed into the bargain. What was the devil 
to do. He had no more parchment with him ; he could not 
trust to his 'memory; and he was unwilling to lose count 
of a single sin. As a last resource, he bethought himself of 
stretching the parchment. Holding one end in his teeth and 
the other in his claws, he tugged and tugged, and strained and 
strained ; but he forgot that the material was unelastic ; and 
presently crack went the parchment into two pieces, and bang 
went the devil's head against the stone wall of the church. 
Saint Brituis burst out into a hearty fit of laughter at the 
devil's misfortune, for which he was sternly rebuked by his 
chief; and, indeed, narrowly escaped that exemplary chastise- 
ment which, as legends tell, befell the nursery heroine Jill 

" For laughing at Jack's disaster." 

When, however, St. Martin came to be informed of the real 
circumstances of the case, he immediately hailed it as a " first 
chop" miracle, of which the world was running rather short 
just then ; and as a stock miracle it has been retailed ever 
since, to the great edification of the faithful ; and as a miracle 
you will find it in good dog Latin and in the Lives of the 
Saints to this day. 



THE OLD MAGICIAN. 285 

You will curl up your lip, I dare say, because I persist in 
stating Puck to be a goblin and not a fairy, and in tracing 
hira even to a habitat among the mischievous demons of the 
Romish hagiology. You will acknowledge him as a demon, 
however, when I tell you that Odericus Vitalis alludes to him 
as the devil whom St. Taurinus banished from the quondam 
temple of Diana at Ebroa, the Norman town of Evreux ; that 
he was known to the Normans as Gubbe, the old man, and 
from thence we have the word Goblin : "Hunc vulgus Gobelinum 
appellat" says Odericus. The Gubbe of the Northmen was 
own brother to the " Tomte-Gubbe," or " old man of the 
house toft" in Sweden, known in Saxony as the spiteful devil 
Hoodekin, Hodken, or Hudken, in Norway as "Nissegoder- 
ing," in Scotland as " Redcap," in England as Puck ; or, on 
a very non lucendo principle (seeing that he was always play- 
ing naughty tricks), as Robin Goodfellow. He is directly 
charged with being a Goblin in your own vaunted Midsummer 
Night's Dream, by one of Titania's fairies. Thus quoth she — 

" Either I mistake your shape and making quite, 
Or else you are that shrewd and knavish sprite 
Called Robin Goodfellow ; are you not he 
That fright the maids of all the villagery ? 



Mislead night wanderers, laughing at their harm, 
Those that Hobgoblin call you . . . " 

If the varlet had been a fairy, all Titania's tribe would have 
known his position and antecedents without questioning him. 
Peas-blossom, Cobweb, Moth, and Mustard-seed were fairies 
if you will; so were those " minions of the moon" that came 
from oxlips and nodding violets, from lush woodbine, from 
sweet musk-roses and wild eglantine, the fairies that warred 
with rear-mice for their leathern wings, and killed the cankers 
in the rose-buds ; the small grey-coated gnats that were Queen 
Mab's waggoners, the joiner squirrels, the fairies' midwives. 
A figo — the fig of Spain — for them all. Puck has nought to 
do with them ; and I demand that his name, as it stands in 
the dramatis persona of all the editions of Shakespeare, as 
" Puck, or Robin Goodfellow, a fairy," shall be expunged and 
altered to " Puck, a Goblin or malicious demon." 

The subject of Puck (continued the old Magician) has do- 



286 THE OLD MAGICIAN. 

tained me much, longer than I anticipated; but I felt so 
strongly on the subject, that I was moved to adduce all the 
evidence I could lay my hands on. It were bootless in this 
stage of the argument to demonstrate that this same Puck is 
the Spanish "Duende," corresponding entirely to the " Tomte 
Gubbe," which fact is attested by Corbaruvias ; and that, in 
another part of Spain, that Puck appears as a Frayle, or little 
friar ; for which you may see Calderon's comedy of La Dama 
Duende. Nor is there time here to show how Puck in Anglo- 
Saxon became Pickeln and Packeln, from which Mr. Home 
Tooke tells us, in the Diversions of Purley, we have Pack or 
Patch, the fool ; likewise Pickle, a mischievous boy, and the 
Pickelharin, oddly enough, though analogically translated as 
Pickle-herring, the zany or mountebank of Goethe's Wilhelm 
Meister, and who (Pickelharin) was so called from his leafy or 
hairy vestment. Ben Jonson re- Anglicised him as the shaggy 
little devil Puckhairy, while the original Puck or Pug became 
Pog, Bog, and Boge in the north of England, Bogle in Scot- 
land, and again returned to England as Bogey, where he dwells 
in the coal-cellar or the nursery-cupboard to this day. There's 
a derivation for you, Scholar ! Think of your merry, spangled- 
winged, sportive fairy Puck, forsooth, turning' out to be 
synonymous with the child-quelling, naughty-boy-kidnapping 
Bogey. The monkey, you know, acquired the name of Pug, 
from his wickedness and malice ; and the Pug-dog, from his 
spitef illness and snappishness. Bwg in the language of the 
British was a goblin ; Bog was the angry god of the Slavi. 
The Anglo-Saxon Bucca and Buck, a goat, were both deriva- 
tives of Puck, and were so called from their skittish, savage 
natures ; and a goat was, if you remember, one of the favourite 
incarnations of the evil one ; finally, we trace the mischievous 
mirth and inebriated inspiration of Puck in the Greek word 
BctfCfcevw. 

Thus far the old Magician. I had listened with bated 
breath to the sage as he dwelt on the pedigrees of his sub- 
jects with a somewhat excusable pride, though I must confess 
I could not refrain from yawning a little (nor has another 
person been able to refrain from doing the like more recently, 
I dare say) at the somewhat tedious dissertations on magical 
etymology into which he was led. The ancient man would 



THE OLD MAGICIAN. 287 

seem to have been imbibing deep draughts from the founts of 
Junius, Menage, Casaubon, Skinner, Minshew, Lemon, and 
the venerable cohort of old English etymologists, to say 
nothing of Thomson, Whiter, Fox Talbot, and the moderns. 
Now the study of etymology produces nearly the very same 
effects that Doctor South ascribes to the study of the Apo- 
calypse : "It finds a man mad, or leaves him so;" and, 
moreover, as the study of Magic has led to not a few commis- 
sions de lunatico, it is probable that the old Magician I had 
been listening to had a " bee in his bonnet," or, as is more 
vernacularly expressed in this part of the country, that he 
had " a tile off," or " eleven pence halfpenny out of the 
shilling." It may be, and is as probable, that he was sane; 
it may be that he never existed save in my brain ; yet he may 
be sitting opposite to me still, graving, didacticising upon the 
former glories and present decay of Magic. 

Yes, its decay. The state of that once glorious and potent 
science is now far more a Case of Real Distress than that of 
Queen Mab and her elves. They at least can obtain engage- 
ments in the pantomimes and Easter spectacles. Doctor Arne's 
deathless music yet summons them to dance on yellow 
sands and there take hands. Music-sellers yet deem them 
worthy as. subjects of delicately tinted lithographic title-pages 
to polkas. There are yet to be found publishers (though few 
alas !) who will invest capital in the illustrations, editing, and 
publishing of fairy tales ; and till Mr. Richard Doyle he die, 
and till Messrs. Leech, and Hablot Browne, and Tenniel, and 
especially Mr. George Cruikshank, masters of the pencil and 
etching point, they die, we shall not lack cunning graphers of 
the life, and light, and glories of Fairyland. But Magic • is 
dead. Its professors never sought to insinuate themselves 
blandly into the imagination like the fairies ; they brought 
neither honeyed words, nor sparkling pictures, nor dulcet music. 
They sought but to control, to terrify, to destroy. Read the 
Arabian Nights through, and perhaps, with the single excep- 
tion of Cassim Baba quartered in the robber's cavern, you 
will not find an incident in that vast collection of fairy tales 
that will excite terror or disgust ; but glance over the awful 
Malleus Mallificarum, as printed on the eve of Saint Catherine, 
Queen, Virgin, and Martyr, in the last decennary of the 



288 THE OLD MAGICIAN. 

fifteenth century — pore over its dusky, black-lettered pages, 
its miniated capitals, and shudder ; turn over the Dictionnaire 
Infernal of Colin de Plancy, the Histoire de la Magie of Jules 
Garinet ; peep fearfully into the mysterious tomes of Piccatrix, 
Cornelius Agrippa, of Delrio and Reniigius, of Glanvill and 
Sinclair; think of the legendary volume of Thomas the 
PJiymer, that was " lost, lost, lost," and " found, found, 
found," in the Lay of the Last Minstrel ; — study these mon- 
strous books — monstrous alike in form and contents — study 
them in the dead of the night (if you have nerve enough), and 
sleep afterwards, nightmareless, if you can. 

Magic ! It is associated with cruelty, ignorance, brutish 
stupidity, and brutal wrong through all time. It recalls the 
ages of darkness, persecution, havoc, and intolerance. It re- 
calls poor maniacs, brooding over forges and alembics, cower- 
ing amid stuffed monsters and noxious elixirs, mumbling- 
incoherent blasphemies over the entrails of dead beasts, and 
the skins of dried reptiles. It recalls the mummeries of the 
Rosicrucians, the laboriously idle speculations of Dee and 
Lilly, the impudent impostures of Romish priestcraft in the 
worst ages of Romecraft ; it recalls with terror and horror the 
appalling buffooneries of witchcraft, the horrible merriment of 
the Witches' Sabbath, and with more terrible and horrible 
reality it brings back, to our lasting shame and disgrace, the 
long long record of aged, maimed, blind, infirm old creatures,, 
chased, scourged, imprisoned, tied hand and foot and drowned, 
hanged and burnt unjustly, and condemned too by learned 
English Judges. It recalls dirty gipseys, and heartless 
swindlers, dwelling in back garrets with hungry cats and 
greasy packs of cards. 

No ; I am not sorry that Magic is in distress ; but I grieve 
more than ever (if that be possible) for Queen Mab and the 
fairies, flouted and contemned by this sometimes and some- 
what too dully practical age. 






NUMBERS OF PEOPLE 

COUNTED AND SIFTED IN 1851. 

In one sense the vast official blue-books, for the issue of 
which the public has to pay a round sum every year, may be 
designated Latter-Day Tracts. Until these very latter days, 
the perusal and cognisance of those portly fasciculi were 
confined to the much suffering proof-readers at the parliamen- 
tary printers', the catalogo -scribes of the national libraries, 
and a few members of parliament. Recently, however, public 
attention has been called to the vast amount of useful and 
interesting information that has lain perdu in these prodigious 
pamphlets, which have for so long a period been wasting 
their sweetness on the dusty shelves of public libraries. Re- 
cently, a sensible young nobleman, Lord Stanley, recommended 
a course of "Blue-books made Easy;" and the judicious 
presentation of spare copies to the libraries of mechanics' 
institutes and free libraries, has brought a considerable share 
of the literature of political economy within the reach of the 
humblest readers. Still a blue-book is but a blue-book — a 
dreadful unreadable folio for a' that. The armies of figures — 
armies that would laugh the Xerxian hosts at Marathon to 
scorn — put our poor little phalanx of patience to scorn. The 
interminable tables, the awfully classical Die Martis, or Decem- 
bris, the grim marginal references, the endless repetitions, the 
inexorable tedium of Question 3,409, warn us off the statis- 
tical premises at the very atrium of the edifice. Mr. Macaulay 
relates that an Italian criminal was once permitted to choose 
between the historical works of Guicciardini and the galleys. 
He chose the former, and began to read ; but the War of Pisa 
was too much for him, and he went back to the oar as to 
a wedding. So can I imagine many a nervous reader pre- 
ferring, in the long run, a month on the treadmill to the 
thorough perusal of a blue-book. 

Pending the suggested publication of a series of these 

u 



290 NUMBERS OF PEOPLE. 

Latter-day Tracts, " adapted to the meanest comprehension," 
we are glad to welcome an instalment, in the form of a con- 
densed report of the last census, taken in 1851. In a genteel 
octavo are embodied the principal results of the enumeration 
of the people of Great Britain ; comprising an account of 
their numbers and distribution ; their ages ; their conjugal 
condition ; their occupations, their birthplace ; how many of 
them were deaf and dumb ; how many blind, how many 
paupers, prisoners, lunatics, or inmates of hospitals, alms- 
houses, and asylums. Of this report, condensed from the 
original magnum opus, presented to the Secretary of State by 
Major Graham, Mr. Farr, and Mr. Horace Mann, let us 
endeavour to give a yet further coDdensation — a condensed 
idea for household readers of the number and condition of the 
households of Great Britain. 

Every one (save perhaps people who never remember any- 
thing, and the little new- weaned child, whose locks begin to 
curl like the tendrils of the vine, and who can scarcely yet 
lisp, far less remember) will call to mind the momentous 
3.1st day of March, 1851 ; on which an army of enumerators, 
thirty thousand six hundred and ten in number, went round 
to every house in the kingdom ; on which it rained schedules 
— all to be filled up with the names, ages, occupations, civil 
condition (whether maid, wife, or widow, husband, father, or 
son), birth-place, of every inhabitant, of every house, that 
night. What dreadful mistakes were made ! how ladies 
hesitated about their ages, and were some of them indignant 
and some amused ; how careless writers blotted their printed 
forms, and weakminded people did not know what to say for 
themselves, giving in incongruous descriptions, in which, 
filling up wrong places, they declared themselves to be Adol- 
phus years of age, profession twenty-three next birthday, and 
born at chandler s-shop-keeper, with two Stratford-le-Bow chil- 
dren ; which descriptions, being obviously absurd, had to be 
amended. All these are matters historical. Likewise how 
many housewives " dratted" the census; and how some repu- 
diated the schedules as County -court summonses ; and how 
some too ardent democrats (not understanding, perhaps, much 
about the matter) denounced the whole affair as being con- 
nected in some vague manner with taxes. 



NUMBERS OF PEOPLE. 291 

On the whole, however, it is stated on authority that the 
enumerators were remarkably successful and accurate in their 
researches. Although the legislature had imposed penalties 
for the omission or refusal of occupiers or families to answer 
circumstantial questions respecting themselves or their families, 
it was not found necessary to enforce the penalty in a single 
instance. The information was cheerfully furnished ; and the 
working classes often took much trouble to get their schedules 
filled up by better penmen than themselves, and to facili- 
tate the inquiry. A few curious cases, and ''difficulties" 
occurred, but not a tithe of what might have been expected 
from the enormous extent of the information procured. One 
gentleman, a magistrate, refused point blank to fill up his 
schedule, or to have anything to do with it ; thinking, no 
doubt, that it was like the enumerator's confounded impudence 
to ask him, a "justice of peace and quorum," to answer his 
questions. But he was written to privately, and at length 
complied with the provisions of the act without an appeal 
to Caesar at the Home Office. In another instance a clergy- 
man refused to return his schedule to the parish clerk, who 
was the enumerator, and sent it direct to the Central Office, 
alleging that otherwise his wife's age would have become 
food for gossip in the village alehouse. 

Again, in some places there were found eccentrics — hermits, 
misogynists, ancient females — who admitted no society save 
cats and parrots, who lived quite inaccessible to everybody, 
and could not be got at anyhow. It is, however, consolatory 
to know that the neighbours of these solitaries generally had 
quite as much to tell about them as the enumerators desired 
to know — and told it. There must have been some curious 
vicarious schedules supplied respecting these eccentrics. I can 
imagine "Old Fluffy ; aged a hundred at least ; is supposed to 
have sold himself to the devil; wears a beard as long as my arm ; 
sleeps on a mattrass stuffed with bank notes ;" or "Miss Grub, 
spinster ; keeps nine cats ; wears a bonnet like a coal-scuttle ; 
is as old as the hills; hasn't been outside the house for twenty 
years; lets off maroons and ether fireworks on Sunday 
evenings, and paints her window panes blue every Easter 
Monday." 

The census of the United Kingdom in 1851 was taken 

TT 1 



292 NUMBERS OF PEOPLE. 

under the authority of two acts of parliament. Each successive 
decimal census since 1801, has been more comprehensive than 
its predecessor, and this last is more particularly replete with 
information concerning the civil and conjugal condition of the 
people ; which the reporters have taken as their key-note in 
their disquisition upon the causes of the vast increase of 
population during the last century. 

For the purposes of enumeration the two kingdoms and the 
principality of Wales (the census of Ireland was conducted 
separately) were divided into 624 registration districts. These 
were again subdivided into 2190 sub-districts, and the sub- 
districts into 30,610 enumeration districts, each being assigned 
to one enumerator, who was required to complete his enumera- 
tion in one day,' March the 31st. Within about two months 
all the household schedules, numbering 4,300,000, together 
with 38,000 enumeration books, had been received at the 
Central Office; and on the 7th of June, 1851, the gross 
return of inhabitants and houses was communicated to the 
Secretary of State, and at once made public. The grand 
result showed that on the 31st of March, 1851, the entire 
population of Great Britain was 21,121,967. In this return 
were included 162,490 of the royal navy and the merchant 
service who were serving abroad or were on the high seas at 
the time the census was taken ; the actual number of souls in 
Great Britain on the night of the 31st being 20,959,477. 

Of British subjects in foreign parts, not soldiers or sailors, 
there were 20,357 in France; 3828 in Russia; 611 in 
Turkey in Europe ; 33 in Persia ; and 649 in China. These 
numbers were obtained from returns furnished by the Foreign 
Office ; but, of course, no exact information could be looked 
for of the actual number of travellers on the continent, in the 
colonies, and in the United States. 65,233 aliens or foreigners 
also landed in England in 1851. 

Curiously enough, I have been unable to find, either in 
the report or in its copious analytical index, any reference 
to the number of foreigners absolutely domiciled among us. 

Of this population of over twenty one millions there 
were, of males, 10,386,048; of females, 10,735,919; the 
females exceeding the males by 349,871. The disparity 
between the sexes was greatest in Scotland, where absenteeism 



NUMBERS OF PEOPLE. 293 

is so mucli in vogue, and where the resident gentlemen 
were obliged to cede to the commanding influence of the ladies, 
being at a discount of ten per cent. 

Finally, while we are upon the round numbers, it may be 
stated that, if we go on " at this rate," the population is 
expected to double itself in fifty -two and -g^- years ! And it is 
also calculated that if the entire population were gathered 
together in one mass, each person being allowed one square 
yard to stand upon, they would cover a space of seven 
square miles. 

On this great r numeration night there were 195,856 in 
barracks, prisons, workhouses, lunatic asylums, hospitals, and 
charitable institutions; 21,491 in barges and vessels engaged 
in inland navigation; and 43,173 in seagoing vessels lying 
in port. In these last, Jack's delight, his lovely Nan, was 
present to the extent of 2008 on board. 

The number of houseless persons returned was 18,249, of 
whom 9972 were in barns, and 8277 in the open air. 
These homeless wanderers were, as far as could be computed, 
gipsies, beggars, strollers, vagrants, tramps, outcasts, and 
criminals. In one instance a tribe of gipsies struck their 
tents, and passed from one parish to another to avoid being 
enumerated. This reminds us somewhat of the anecdote of 
the Irishman's pig, which frisked about so frantically that 
his master couldn't count him. Considering the occurrence in 
a more serious point of view, we seem to descry some remnant 
of old oriental manners and antipathies piercing through this 
disinclination of the mysterious Zingari to be counted. The 
enumerator of 1851 appears to stand in the faintest remotest 
shadow of the days when David the King numbered Israel, 
and Joab counted the people from Beersheba even unto Dan, 
and a census was thought to be an abominable thing. 
Whether the gipsies were actuated by any of the prejudices 
of the Israelites is problematical : perhaps they associated 
the census vaguely but disagreeably with a determination to 
bring them under the sway of the parish beadle or the count}' 
police, both powers exclusively obnoxious to the Rommany 
chals — the Caloros, as Mr. Borrow informs us they call 
themselves. 

It is obvious that nothing but a broadly presumptive 



294 NUMBERS OF PEOPLE. 

estimate could be taken of the nondomiciled population in 
1851. What destitute wretches were manifest, were counted; 
but how many hundreds — may I without exaggeration say 
thousands — must have remained unrecorded in 'the enume- 
rators' schedules. Houseless poverty with unfed sides, and 
looped and windowed raggedness, there must have been 
cowering in the black tenebrae of dark entries, in the dank 
shadows of railway arches, and under the dry arches of 
bridges; under the lee of tilted carts and timber stacks; 
rolled up like hedgehogs before the deadly warmth of brick 
and lime kilns; crouching behind ambuscades of lath and 
plaster on the bare joists of unfinished houses; huddled 
up stealthily in or under baskets in the London markets with 
potatoes for a pillow and a tarpaulin for a counterpane; 
snatching a surreptitious, quaking, waking, shivering sleep — 
a sleep disturbed by nightmares of stern policemen with 
strident voices and loudly creaking boots, of violent market- 
gardeners with pails of water, of the testy market-beadle with 
his cane. Were these enumerated ? the poverty-stricken 
rogues forlorn, who clambered into haystacks and coal-barges 
and empty wagons, and dilapidated post-chaises drawn 
together in wheelwrights' yards, and in silent places where 
tall ladders raised their spectral forms in the moonlight ; the 
masses of wretched rags that should have been children, lying 
huddled together round, a-top of each other, gathering a 
scanty warmth by close contiguity : the miserable heaps of 
utter worn-out poverty cast upon remote doorsteps, motionless 
as sleeping dogs, and which but for the larger size and the 
battered bonnets, might have been dogs for any human 
kindred that acknowledged them. Who counted the phantoms 
in the street, that should have been young and beautiful, and 
women ? Not Lais in the Regent's Park, not Aspasia in her 
brougham, nor Phrynia at the casino, not Timandra in the 
boudoir, not these, but that phantom-world which we see 
gibbering in the gaslight; flittering in the shadows of 
Westminster Abbey and among the trees of the Queen's 
Park ; cowering in the bays of the bridges ; brawling with 
tipsy levellers ; shrieking in the stillness of the night ; falling 
into fits on the pavement ; struggling with the police ; lurk- 
ing on the bridges ; hovering at corners ; creeping by 



NUMBERS OF PEOPLE. 295 

taverns ; nameless, homeless, sexless, friendless, foodless, 
penniless, despairing, drunk and dying. 

And the gay young sparks who were out all night ? And 
that sad dog Tom Pipes, who hadn't been home for a week ? 
And A. B. C, who was entreated to return to his dis- 
tracted mother, when all should be forgotten, and he 
should be allowed to go to sea (whither we sincerely hope he 
went and was dead sick) ? And the young Mulatto lady 
in a white chip bonnet and cherry-coloured boots, who took 
a second-class ticket to London from the Pyganwyssel station, 
and had not since been heard of? And Mr. Silas Duffer, 
Grocer of Blackburn, who absconded under rather more than 
a suspicion of being a fraudulent bankrupt, and of whose 
whereabouts the superintendent of the Blackburn police 
would be glad to hear to the extent of five pounds reward ? And 
John Rose or Rolls, a native of Oxfordshire, aged twenty-nine, 
absent from the parish of Guestling, under a cloud, not very 
like a whale, but very like an ewe-sheep, stolen; who was wanted 
so badly in the columns of the Hue and Cry, and was supposed 
to be in company with " a woman from Hastings, fat, and in 
the habit of smoking a short pipe ? " And all the soldiers, 
sailors, and marines, who had abruptly parted company with 
their disconsolate commanding officers, not to say deserted, 
taking with them the greater part of their regimental neces- 
saries ? And Baron Leightdigit, and Count De Bilko, and 
Madame de Skoppliftt, and Captain Teetotum, and the Hon- 
ourable Miss Amory ; for all of whose addresses the secretary 
of that occult association, the London Society for the Protection 
of Trade, would be very much obliged ? And Foxy William ; 
who, when the enumerators were peaceably making up the 
schedules, was transacting business in the plate closet of a 
villa at Camberwell, with a piece of black crape over his face, 
a jemmy and a wax candle in one pocket, and a pistol and a 
life-preserver in the other. Where were all these units of 
population on the night that the people were numbered ? 
How many were enumerated under false names ? How many 
were not enumerated at all ? Were people with aliases put 
down twice ? If the Truth could in all cases have been told 
and made manifest, what awful secrets those 38,000 enumera- 
tion books would have been able to disclose ! 



296 NUMBERS OF PEOPLE. 

It was found that there were in Great Britain, 4,312,388 
separate families, against 2,260,202 families in 1801. There 
were of inhabited houses, 3,648,347, holding 20,816,351 
inhabitants. The population of London was 2,362,236, 
against 958,863, in 1801. 

Lest your breath, eve-sight, and patience should be entirely 
taken away by these tremendous arrays of figures, let us see 
what we can gather from the explanation attempted to be 
given by the computers and reporters, of the vast and dispro- 
portionate increase of the population since the commencement 
of the present century. 

We say disproportionate because, since 1801, we have had 
a war of fifteen years' duration, and of the most sanguinary 
character ; because emigration has been a gigantic and yearly 
increasing drain on the population ; and, most dispropor- 
tionate of all, because in 1751, the population only amounted 
to 7,000,000, against 21,000,000 in 1851; an increase of 
14,000,000 in 1851, while the increase of the numbers in 
the century preceding 1751 (from 1651 to 1751) was only 
1,000,000. 

Xow is this to be traced, it is ashed, to a simple question of 
supply and demand ? Is it something fortuitous, or entirely 
inexplicable ? Is it the result of some simple change in the 
institution of families; or of some miraculous addition to the 
powers of population ? To what is this marvellous multipli- 
cation of the population, and its previous slow progress due ? 
The census reporters find a reasonable solution of the question, 
and ascribe the increase to three prime causes. Science, good 
manners and marriage. In the first place, science is produc- 
ing an immense decrease in mortality. "We have (shame to 
us ! ) our choleras, epidemics, and endemics still, but the great 
plagues that decimated England in the sixteenth and seven- 
teenth centuries — the black fevers, falling sicknesses, that 
carried off their thousands and tens of thousands at a time, are 
no more. The extinction of the great plagues was followed 
by a rapid diminution of disease. Science in its medicinal 
form made seven-league strides, in the discovery of the circula- 
tion of the blood by Harvey, and the active system of treatment 
adopted by Sydenham. That deadly foe to beauty as well as 
to life, the small-pox, which was fatal to Queen Mary in 1695, 



NUMBERS OF PEOPLE. 297 

first attacked in its outworks by inoculation, was finally com- 
pelled to capitulate to the discovery of vaccination by Jenner. 
The plague at Marseilles in 1719, made England cautious; 
and, good coming out of evil, led to a work of lasting import- 
ance by the illustrious Doctor Mead. The army from 1748 
to 1746, was followed to the Low Countries by Sir John 
Pringle, who successfully investigated the circumstances that 
affected the health of large bodies of troops on land ; although 
it must be owned that these investigations do not seem to 
have been of much service to the fighting troops of 1854; 
the commissariat and surgical arrangements in the Crimea 
being disgracefully deficient. Captain Cook, in his great 
voyages of circumnavigation, showed how sailors, who could not 
formerly be kept alive two months or in good health in the Chan- 
nel, might, by proper provisions and judicious management, 
be carried round the globe in safety. Science, which had reduced 
the small-pox almost to impotence, now began to diminish 
the terrors of the scurvy ; and science combined with philan- 
thropy, by amending the sanitary state of prisons and public 
institutions, rooted out the horrible jail-fevers, and " assize- 
sicknesses," which before had carried off judges on the bench, 
criminals in the dock, and jurymen in the box, year after 
year. 

Science next began to act, and vigorously, upon industry ; 
and industry, beneath its ripening protection, increased with 
amazing celerity. Coal was employed in the smelting of iron 
instead of the old-fangled charcoal ; and 2,500,000 tons were 
produced in 1851, against 17,350, in 1740. Science became 
wedded to agriculture. Lord Townshend, withdrawing from 
Walpole's ministry, became a new Cincinnatus, and devoted 
himself with ardour to agriculture — introducing the new 
system of turnip-growing from Germany. The landed pro- 
prietors left off (at least the majority of them did) being 
ignorant Jacobites or guzzling, brutal Squire Westerns, wast- 
ing their time in intrigues, drowning their senses in drink, or 
squandering their estates in gambling ; and instead of these 
disreputable diversions, devoted their capital and intelligence 
to the improvement of their lands. Agricultural societies 
were encouraged ; new processes were tried ; commons en- 
closed ; marshes drained ; the breed of sheep and cattle 



298 NUMBERS OF PEOPLE. 

improved, and machinery introduced. The aristocratic genius 
of 1670 was the Duke of Buckingham — the painter, fiddler, 
chemist, and buffoon ; who wrote scandalous poetry, intrigued, 
gambled, and fought duels. The aristocratic genius of 1770 
was the Duke of Bridgewater ; who to accomplish his great 
engineering plans, allowed himself for personal expenses, out 
of his princely fortune, no more than 40 01. a year, and whose 
greatest glory is, that he was the patron and friend of James 
Brindley the engineer. 

Lastly, and pre-eminently, science gave us steam. The 
spinning-machines first put forth by Arkwright, Hargreaves, 
and Crompton, were all adapted to steam power by James 
Watt. And the unconquered arm of steam began as good 
Doctor Darwin predicted, to 

Drag the slow barge and drive the rapid car. 

Though the latter part of the Doctor's prophecy, 

And on wide waving wings expanded bear 
The flying chariot thro' the realms of air, 

has yet to be fulfilled. Science by steam produced a thou- 
sand different wares ; the wealth of the country, its stock and 
produce, increased in even a faster ratio than the people. 
Lastly came steam-vessels and railroads, and electric tele- 
graphs, and the population were placed not only in easy, but 
direct commuuication with one another. 

One cause of the increase of the population is the diminu- 
tion of mortality ; another and more important one is to be 
found in the increase of the births. And this increase is 
owing to good manners and marriage. From 1651 to 1751, 
the morals of Great Britain were of the loosest description. 
Profligacy was fashionable ; irreligion was fashionable ; gam- 
bling was fashionable ; drunkenness was fashionable ; duelling 
was fashionable ; debt was very fashionable indeed. What 
could the common people do but imitate their betters ? On the 
scandalously merry reign of Charles the Second we need not 
dwell, save to remark that Dryden, the poet-laureate, in a 
poem supposed to be written under the direct inspiration of 
his sacred majesty (Absalom and Achitophel), directly advo- 
cated polygamy. The court of William and Mary was frigidly 



NUMBERS OF PEOPLE. 299 

decorous ; and Queen Anne was chaste, formal, and devout 
(Chesterfield called her so by way of reproach) : but the state 
of society during the reigns of the two first Georges was as 
grossly immoral as it was tastelessly stupid. In the first reign 
we have the last instance of a worthless woman being raised to 
the British peerage — the Countess of Yarmouth. The law of 
marriage was slight, involved, in bad odour, and so perplex- 
ing that it was often resorted to as a means of seduction. The 
institution of marriage itself was rapidly falling into disuse 
and contempt. You could be married when and where you 
liked or not at all. There were infamous dens in the Fleet 
where ragged-cassocked divines redolent of the aqua vitee 
bottle, and the onion and tobacco odours of Mount Scoundrel,' 
were always ready to perform the marriage ceremony for half- 
a-guinea, or less, the witness being some boon companion of 
the parson, or his servant-maid. One Mr. Keith had a 
" marriage shop" in May Fair, where upwards of six thousand 
marriages were celebrated annually, with promptitude and 
dispatch, and at a very low rate indeed. In the country there 
were itinerant marryers who went by the gracefully-dignified 
and canonical names of hedge-parsons and couple -beggars, 
and who married a drunken tinker to a beggar's callet for 
anything they could get — a shilling, a lump of bacon, or a 
can of small ale. Into such utter contempt and scandal 
had our matrimonial polity fallen, that continental nations 
refused to recognise the legality of an English marriage ; and 
Holland and some other countries compelled such of their 
subjects as had contracted a matrimonial alliance in England 
to be married again publicly on their return. These dis- 
graceful facts are corroborated by Smollett, by Tindal, by 
the learned Picart, in the Ceremonies and Religious Customs 
of the Various Nations of the Known World, by the news- 
papers of the day, and by the parliamentary debates. To put 
an end to this abominable state of things, a new marriage 
bill was introduced, in 1753, by Lord Hardwicke. In the 
Commons it was bitterly opposed. Mr. Fox,* who had him- 
self married clandestinely the eldest daughter of the Duke of 
Richmond, contended that it would be of the most dangerous 

* The father of Charles James Fox, and afterwards created Lord Holland. 



300 NUMBERS OF PEOPLE. 

conseqence to the female sex, and that it would endanger 
our very existence ; for that without a continuous supply of 
laborious and industrious poor no nation could long exist, 
which supply could only be got by promoting marriage among 
such people. Mr. Nugent said that a public marriage was 
against the genius and nature of our people (hear Nugent .') 
and that our people were exceedingly fond of private mar- 
riages, and saving a little money. (Hear him ! Good !) 
Finally, Mr. Charles Townshend, laying his hand on his heart, 
declared it one of the most cruel enterprises against the fair 
sex that ever entered into the heart of man, and suspected 
some latent design in it to secure all the heiresses in the 
kingdom to the eldest sons of noble and rich families. 
(Immense cheering, of course.) In spite, however, of the elo- 
quence of the disinterested Fox, the patriotic Nugent, and the 
sentimental Townshend, the bill, after some violent debates, one 
of which continued until three o'clock in the morning ; and 
after a wise and luminous speech from Solicitor- General 
Murray, afterwards Lord Mansfield, passed the Commons, and 
became law. Mr. Keith and his brethren of the Fleet found that 
their occupation was gone. Marriages, by the new law, were 
obliged to be entered in the parish register, and a strict line 
of demarcation was drawn between the married and the 
unmarried. Experience soon showed that instead of stopping 
marriage and the growth of population, the act had the 
contrary effect, by divesting the marriage ceremony of dis- 
graceful associations, and by making it, not a mere verbal 
promise, but a life contract. 

Before 1753, no exact record of the number of marriages 
existed. Since that date, the marriage registers have been 
preserved in England, and show an increase from 50,972, in 
1756, to 63,310, in 1764. The "rage of marrying," writes 
the amiable Chesterfield, in 1764, "is very prevalent ; " just 
as if he had been alluding to the rage for South Sea stock or 
for wearing bag-wigs or high-heeled shoes. After many 
fluctuations, the marriages rose to seventy, eighty, ninety, 
and a hundred thousand annually, and in the last census 
(1851) to 154,206. Fourteen millions were added to the 
population. The increase of the population was 187 per 
cent., or at the rate of one per cent, annually. 



NUMBERS OF PEOPLE. 301 

As regards the present conjugal condition of the people, we 
may state, there were in 1851, in Great Britain, 3,391,271 
husbands, and 3,461,524 wives. By this statement it 
would seem that every gude wife has not a gude man, the 
number of wives considerably exceeding the husbands. Or, 
lest it should be thought that any of the three millions and a 
half husbands entertain Mahommedan notions and have more 
than one wife, it must be remembered that some thousands 
of the husbands of England were serving their country abroad 
in 1851; many were engaged in commerce in far distant 
lands; some were "to Aleppo gone, master o' the Tiger," 
leaving their wives to munch chestnuts at home ; while a few, 
shall we whisper it, may have bolted from their wives 
altogether. There were 382,969 widowers, and 795,590 
widows. (A terrible phalanx to think on !) Of bachelors 
above twenty and under twenty-one there were 1,689,116, of 
spinsters of the same ages, 11,767,194. In many instances, 
of course, and where it is impossible of detection, marriage 
has been either concealed or simulated. It is not reasonable 
to suppose that people would tell the enumerator all. In 
England and Wales, seven per cent, of the female population 
are widows ; in Scotland eight per cent. ; in the British 
islands nine per cent. In London we are blessed with widows 
to the extent of fourteen per cent., and at Canterbury and 
Bury St. Edmunds they exceed fifteen per cent. This ought 
to make one serious. The highest proportion of widows is 
found, naturally, in seaport towns, where the population 
consists mainly of seamen, fishermen, boatmen, and such as 
go down to the sea in ships, and are consequently exposed to 
sudden death. 

Of " old maids " over forty (we may be ungallant, but we 
must be truthful), there were 359,969, and of old bachelors 
(shame on them!) 275,204. Of young ladies, spinsters, 
between the ages of twenty and forty, who, in 1851, were 
roving " in maiden meditation, fancy free," there were 
1,407,225, of young bachelors 1,413,912. Altogether, the 
number of spinsters above the legal age for marriage 
(fourteen in the male, and twelve in the female), was 
3,469,571, of bachelors 3,110,243. Of all the females in 
Great Britain between twenty and forty, forty-two per cent. 



302 NUMBERS OF PEOPLE. 

are spinsters, and of the males of the corresponding periods 
of life, thirty-one per cent. 

We can only afford to cast a hurried glance at the interest- 
ing section of the report devoted to the ages of the 
people. We may state, however, that there were in 1851, 
in Great Britain. 578,743 " babes and sucklings" (infants 
under one year). Under the head of longevity, we find that 
of the inhabitants 596,030 had passed the barrier of three- 
score years and ten ; more than 129,000 were over fourscore ; 
100,000 had attained the years which the last of Plato's 
climacteric square numbers expressed (nine times nine = 
eighty -one); nearly 10,000 had lived ninety years or more; 
a band of 2038 aged pilgrims had been wandering ninety- 
five years or more on the unended journey, and 319 said 
that they have witnessed more than a hundred revolutions of 
the seasons. 

The department of the report devoted to the enumeration 
and classification of the occupations of the people is perhaps 
the most interesting and instructive in the work. We should 
be far out-stepping, however, the proposed limits of this 
paper, if we were to follow the reporters in their minute 
disquisitions upon the fourteen different classes into which 
they have divided the different varieties of occupations ; many 
of the classes themselves being again divided into three or 
more sub-classes. Let us content ourselves, therefore, with 
stating the numerical strength of a few of the multifarious 
workers in this busiest of countries. 

Her Majesty the Queen stands of course A, per se A: A one 
and alone ; though the tabular report reads oddly thus : 
Queen one, accountants 6605. Old play-goers, and ladies and 
gentlemen interested in the revival of the drama, will be glad 
to hear that there are as many as 2041 actors and actresses. 
There were 3111 barristers, special pleaders, and conveyancers 
(an intolerable deal of wig and gown to, we are afraid, only a 
halfpenny- worth of briefs); 94 taxidermists; only 11 ar- 
mourers ; 45 dealers in archery goods ; and 2 apiarians, or 
bee-dealers. 

It is with considerable glee and rejoicing that we state that 
there were only 2 apparitors in Great Britain. We don't 
know what an apparitor may be, or what he is like ; but we 



NUMBERS OF PEOPLE. 303 

imagine him to be something dreadful in a gown connected 
with the Court of Chancery. Sometimes we embody him as 
an incarnation of fees. Or perhaps, like Mawworm, he 
"likes to be despised," and it is the despising of an apparitor 
that forms the unpardonable legal sin, contempt of court. At 
any rate, we are glad to hear that the apparitors were in 
numbers such a feeble folk. We sincerely hope that they 
have not multiplied since 1851 ; and we should like to know 
the two apparitors — that we might avoid them. Ladies, do 
you know how many artificial flower-makers there were in 
1851? 3510. The number of dealers in crinoline, dress 
improvers, dress expanders, and jupes bouffantes, is not set 
down. We presume they are to be found under the head of 
milliners or dress-makers, of whom there were 267,791 — a 
mighty army of vanity. For the wounded in the battle of 
life, the Miss Kilmanseggs, whose mettlesome horses running 
away from them may fracture their limbs, and cause them to 
require golden legs, there were 20 artificial limb and eye- 
makers. 

The artists and painters mustered strong; there were 5444 
of them. On the other hand, literature made by no means 
a conspicuous figure in the returns, only 524 authors being 
set down, 141 literary private secretaries, and 1320 editors 
and writers, together with 207 reporters for newspapers, and 
short-hand writers. 

There were only 3 ballad-singers and sellers. This must 
surely be an under-statement. We can hear four bawling 
lustily in the street as we write. There were 8 barytes manu- 
facturers ; 3 pea-splitters (how many " splitters of straws?" 
we wonder) ; '46,661 licensed victuallers and beer-shop 
keepers; 305 bill-stickers; 9 wooden spoon makers; 16 brass 
collar makers ; 50 buhl cutters ; 512 burial-ground servants ; 
13,256 attorneys and solicitors ; 26,015 butchers' wives; 3076 
cabbies; 198 capitalists! There were 6 cap-peak makers; 20 
cartridge makers; 60 catsmeat dealers; 335 chaffcutters ; 
55,443 charwomen; 12 chimney-pot makers ; 43,760 commer- 
cial clerks, and 16,625 law clerks; 103 clerical agents; 3 cocoa 
nut fibre makers ; 1 5 conjurors and performers at shows ; 5 
coral-carvers; 61 corn-cutters; 7209 costermongers ; 246 
courtiers (that is to say, members of the court and household 



304 NUMBERS OF PEOPLE. 

of her Majesty, exclusive of domestic servants) ; 10 cover- 
makers (what covers ? dish-covers, table-covers, cloth-covers ? ) ; 
77 cuppers and bleeders; 32 crossing-sweepers ; 101 "blue" 
manufacturers; 142 danseuses and ballet girls; 20,240 de- 
pendants upon relatives: 18,146 of them females, poor things ; 

15 "doffer" plate-makers; 5 "dulse" dealers; 26,562 inde- 
pendent ladies and gentlemen; 10 gilt toy makers; 21,371 
governesses; 884 gravediggers ; 17 gridiron makers, and 92 
frying-pan makers; 15 "grit" sellers; 40 gut spinners ; 48 
hame (cart-horse collar) makers; 8 handcuff-makers; 30,533 
pedlars ; 9 1 hoblers and lumpers ; 7 honey dealers ; 8 8 leech- 
breeders; 2 female models to artists (we know twelve ourselves) ; 

16 orris (gold and silver lace) weavers; 904,611 paupers, 
and nothing else; 4867 pawnbrokers; 12 growers of and 
dealers in rods; 2,697,717 schoolgirls and schoolboys ; and 
55,020 children receiving tuition at home. There were 746 
sheriffs' officers; 130 shroud-makers; 19,075 shepherds; 5 
shoeblacks; 2 skate-makers; 238 "stevedores"; 3 water- 
bailiffs and sea-reeves ; 2 ventriloquists ; 2 waste paper 
dealers; 54 water gilders; and 1089 washers of the dead to 
the Jews. 

So much have we set down in a lame and imperfect abstract 
of the results of the census of 1851. How little we have 
been enabled to give of the gist of the report may be judged 
from this concluding and great fact, that the number of facts 
which had originally to be copied into tabular statements, 
when the census was taken, exceeded One Hundred 
Millions ! 



A DEAD SECEET. 



In what manner I became acquainted with that which 
follows, and from whom I had it, it serves not to relate here. 
It is enough that he was hanged, and that this is his story. 
* * n- * *t 

"And how came you," I asked, "to be — " I did not like 
to say hanged for fear of wounding his delicacy — but I hinted 
my meaning by an expressive gesture. 

"How came I to be hanged?" he echoed in a tone of 
strident hoarseness. "You would like to know all about it 
— wouldn't you ? " 

He was sitting opposite to me at the end of the walnut-tree 
table in his shirt and trousers, his bare feet on the bare 
polished oak floor. There was a dark bistre ring round each 
of his eyes ; and they — being spherical rather than oval, with 
the pupils fixed and coldly shining in the centre of the orbits 
— were more like those of some wild animal than of a man. 
The hue of his forehead, too, was ghastly and dingy ; blue, 
violet, and yellow, like a bruise that is five days old. There 
was a clammy sweat on his beard and under the lobes of his 
ears ; and the sea-breeze coming gently through the open 
Venetian blinds (for the night was very sultry), fanned his 
long locks of coarse dark hair until you might almost fancy 
you saw the serpents of the Furies writhing in them. The 
fingers of his lean hands were slightly crooked inwards, owing 
to some involuntary muscular rigidity, and I noticed that his 
whole frame was pervaded by a nervous trembling, less spas- 
modic than regular, and resembling that which shakes a man 
afflicted with delirium tremens. 

I had given him a cigar. After moistening the end of it 
in his mouth, he said, bending his eyes towards me, but still 
more on the wall behind my chair than on my face : " It's no 
use. You may torture me, scourge me, flay me alive. You 



306 A DEAD SECRET. 

may rasp me with, rusty files, and seethe me in vinegar, 
and rub my eyes with gunpowder — but I can't tell you where 
the child is. I don't know — I never knew ? How am I to 
make you believe that I don't know — that I never knew ? " 

" My good friend," I remarked, "You do not seem to be 
aware that, so far from wishing j t ou to tell me where the 
child you allude to is, I am not actuated by the slightest 
curiosity to know anything about any child whatever. Permit 
me to observe that I cannot see the smallest connection 
between a child and your being hanged." 

" No connection ?" retorted my companion with vehemence. 
" It is the connection — the cause. But for that child I should 
never have been hanged." 

He went on muttering and panting about this child ; and I 
pushed towards him a bottle of thin claret. (Being liable to 
be called up at all hours of the night, I find it lighter drinking 
than any other wine.) He filled a large tumbler — which he 
emptied into himself, rather than drank — and I observed that 
his lips were so dry and smooth with parchedness, that the 
liquid formed little globules of moisture on them, like drops 
of water on an oil-cloth. Then he began : 

I had the misery to be born (he said) about seven-and- 
thirty years ago. I was the offspring of a double misery, for 
my mother was a newly-made widow when I was born, and 
she died in giving me birth. What my name was before I 
assumed the counterfeit that has blasted my life, I shall not 
tell you. But it was no patrician high-sounding title, for my 
father was a petty tradesman, and my mother had been 
a domestic servant. Two kinsmen succoured me in my 
orphanage. They were both uncles ; one by my father's, the 
other by my mother's side. The former was a retired sailor, 
rich, and a bachelor. The latter was a grocer, still in busi- 
ness. He was a widower, with one daughter, and not very 
well-to-do in the world. They hated each other with the sort 
of cold, fixed, and watchful aversion that a savage cat has for 
a dog too large for her to worry. 

These two uncles played a miserable game of battledore 
and shuttlecock with me for nearly fourteen years. I was 
bandied about from one to the other, and equally maltreated 
by both. Now, it was my Uncle Collerer who discovered 



A DEAD SECRET. 307 

that I was starved by my Uncle Morbus, and took me under 
bis protection. Now, my Uncle Morbus was indignant at my 
Uncle Collerer for beating me, and insisted that I should 
return to his roof. I was beaten and starved by one, and 
starved and beaten by the other. I endeavoured — with that 
cunning which brutal treatment will teach the dullest child 
— to trim, my sails to please both uncles. I could only suc- 
ceed by ministering to the hatred they mutually had one for 
the other. I could only propitiate Collerer by abusing 
Morbus : the only road to Morbus' s short-lived favour was 
by defaming Collerer. Nor do I think I did either of them 
much injustice ; for they were both wicked-minded old men. 
I believe either of them would have allowed me to starve in 
the gutter ; only each thought that, appearing to protect me, 
would naturally spite the other. 

"When I was about fifteen years old it occurred to me, that 
I should make an election for good and all between my 
uncles ; else, between these two knotty crabbed stools I might 
fall to the ground. Naturally enough I chose the rich uncle 
— the retired sailor — Collerer ; and, although I dare say he 
knew I only clove to him for the sake of his money, he seemed 
perfectly satisfied with my hearty abuse of my Uncle Morbus, 
and my total abnegation of his society ; for, for three years 
I never went near his house, and when he met me in the 
street I gave him the breadth of the pavement, and recked 
nothing for his shaking his fist at me, and calling me an 
ungrateful hound. My Uncle Collerer, although retired from 
the sea, had not left off making money. He lent it at usury 
on mortgages, and in numberless other crawling ways. I 
soon became his right hand, and assisted him in grinding the 
needy, in selling up poor tradesmen, and in buckling on the 
spurs of spendthrifts when they started for the race, the end 
of which was to be the jail. My uncle was pleased with me ; 
and, although he was miserably parsimonious in his house- 
keeping and in his allowance to me, I had hopes and lived 
on ; but very much in the fashion of a rat in a hole. 

I had known Mary Morbus, the grocer's daughter, years 
before. She was a sickly delicate child, and I had often 
teased and struck and robbed her of her playthings, in my 
evil childhood. But she grew up a surpassingly beautiful 



308 A DEAD SECRET. 

creature, and I loved her. We met by stealth in the park 
outside her father's door while he was asleep in church on 
Sundays ; and I fancied she began to love me. There was 
little in my mind or person, in my white face, elf-locks and 
dull speech to captivate a girl ; but her heart was full of 
love, and its brightness gilded my miserable clay. I felt my 
heart newly opened. I hoped for something more than my 
uncle's money bags. We interchanged all the nighty vows 
of everlasting affection and constancy common to boys and 
girls ; and, although we knew the two fierce hatreds that 
stood betwixt us and happiness, we left the accomplishment 
of our wishes to time and fortune, and went on hoping and 
loving. 

One evening, at supper-time — for which meal we had the 
heel of a Dutch cheese, a loaf of household bread, and a pint 
of small beer — I noticed that my Uncle Collerer looked more 
malignant and sullen than usual. He spoke little, and bit his 
food as if he had a spite against it. When supper was over, 
he went to an old worm-eaten bureau in which he was wont 
to keep documents of value; and taking out a bundle of 
papers, untied and began to read them. I took little heed of 
that, for his favourite course of evening reading was bonds 
and mortgage deeds ; and on every eve of bills of exchange 
falling due he would spend hours in poring over the accept- 
ances and indorsements, and even in bed he would lie awake 
half the night moaning and crooning lest the bills should not 
be paid on the morrow. After carefully reading and sorting 
these papers, he tossed them over to me," and left the room 
without a word. Then I heard him going up-stairs to the 
top of the house, where my room was. 

I opened the packet with trembling hands and a beating 
heart. I found every single letter I had written to Mary 
Morbus. The room seemed to turn round. The white sheet 
I held and the black letters dancing on it were all I could see. 
All beyond — the room, the house, -the world — was one black 
unutterable gulf of darkness. I tried to read a line — a line 
I had known by heart for months ; but, to my scared senses, 
it might as well have been Chaldee. Then my uncle's heavy 
step was heard on the stairs. 

He entered the room, dragging after him a small black 



A DEAD SECRET. 309 

portmanteau in#which I kept all that I was able to call my 
own. " I happen to have a key that opens this," he said, 
" and have read every one of the fine love-letters that silly 
girl has sent you. But I have been much more edified by the 
perusal of yours, which I only received from your good uncle 
Morbus — strangle him ! — last night. I'm a covetous hunks, 
am I ? You live in hopes, do you ? Hope told a flattering 
tale, my young friend. I've only two words to say to you," 
continued my uncle, after a few minutes' composed silence on 
his part, and of blank consternation on mine. " All your rags 
are in that trunk. Either give up Mary Morbus — now and 
for ever, and write a letter to her here in my presence to that 
effect — or turn out into the street and never show your face 
here again. Make up your mind quickly, and for good." 
He then filled his pipe and lighted it. 

While he sat composedly smoking his pipe, I was employed 
in making up my wretched mind. Love, fear, interest, avarice 
— cursed avarice — alternately gained ascendency within me. 
At length there came a craven inspiration that I might tem- 
porise ; that by pretending to renounce Mary, and yet secretly 
assuring her of my constancy, I might play a double game, 
and yet live in hopes of succeeding to my uncle's wealth. To 
my shame and confusion, I caught at this coward expedient, 
and signified my willingness to do as my uncle desired. 

"Write then," he resumed, flinging me a sheet of letter- 
paper and a pen, " I will dictate." 

I took the pen ; and following his dictation wrote, I scarcely 
can tell what now ; but I suppose some abject words to Mary, 
saying that I resigned all claim to her hand. 

" That'll do very nicely, nephew," said my uncle, when 
I had finished. "We needn't fold it, or seal it, or post it, 
because — he, he, he ! — we can deliver it on the spot." We 
were in the front parlour, which was separated from the back 
room by a pair of folding-doors. My uncle got up, opened 
one of these ; and with a mock bow ushered in my Uncle 
Morbus and my cousin Mary. 

" A letter for you, my dear," grinned the old wretch ; " a 
letter from your true love. Though I dare say you'll have no 
occasion to read it, for you must have heard me. I speak 
plain enough, though I am asthmatic, and can't last long — 



310 A DEAD SECRET 

can't last long — eh, nephew?" This was » quotation from 
one of my own letters. 

When Mary took the letter from my uncle, her hand shook 
as with the palsy. But when I besought her to look at me, 
and passionately adjured her to believe that I was yet true to 
her, she turned on me a glance of scornful incredulity; and, 
crushing the miserable paper in her hand, cast it con- 
temptuously from her. 

" You marry my daughter," my Uncle Morbus piped forth 
— "you ? Your father couldn't pay two-and- twopence in the 
pound. He owed me money, he owes me money to this day. 
Why ain't there laws to make sons pay their fathers' debts ? 
You marry my daughter ! Do you think I'd have your 
father's son — do you think I'd have your uncle's nephew for 
my son-in-law ? " I could see that the temporary bond of 
union between my two uncles was already beginning to loosen; 
and a wretched hope sprang up within me. 

" Get out of my house, you and your niece, too ! " cried my 
Uncle Collerer. " You've served my turn, and I've served 
yours. Now, go ! " 

I could hear the two old men fiercely, yet feebly, quarrelling 
in the passage, and Mary weeping piteously without saying a 
word. Then the great street door was banged to, and my 
uncle came in, muttering and panting. " I hope you are 
satisfied now, uncle," I said. 

" Satisfied ! " he cried with a sort of shriek, catching up 
the great earthen jar, with the leaden top, in which he kept 
his tobacco, as though he meant to fling it at me. " Satisfied! 
— I'll satisfy you : go. Go ! and never let me see your hang- 
dog face again ! " 

" You surely do not intend to turn me out of doors, uncle?" 
I faltered. 

" March, bag and baggage. If you are here a minute 
longer I'll call the police. Go ! " And he pointed to the 
door. 

" But where am I to go ? " I asked. 

" Go and beg," said my uncle ; " go and cringe to your 
dear Uncle Morbus. Off with you ! " 

So saying, he opened the door, kicked my trunk into the 
hall, thrust me out of the room and into the street, and pushed 



A DEAD SECRET. 311 

my portmanteau after me, without my making the slightest 
resistance. He slammed the door in my face, and left me in 
the open street, at twelve o'clock at night. 

I slept that night at a coffee-shop. I had a few shillings 
in my pocket ; and next morning I took a lodging at, I think, 
four shillings a week, in a court, somewhere up a back street 
between Gray's Inn and Leather Lane, Holborn. My room 
was at the top of the house. The court below swarmed with 
dirty, ragged children. My lodging was a back garret, and 
when I opened the window I could only see a narrow strip of 
sky, and a foul heap of sooty roofs, chimney-pots and leads, 
with the great clingy brick tower of a church towering above 
all. Where the body of the church was, I never knew. 

I wrote letter after letter to my uncles and to Mary, but 
never received a line in answer. I wandered about the streets 
all day, feeding on saveloys and penny loaves. I went to my 
wretched bed by daylight, and groaned for darkness to come ; 
then groaned that it might grow light again. I knew no one 
to whom I could apply for employment, and knew no means 
by which I could obtain it. The house I lived in and the 
neighbourhood were full of foreign refugees and street mounte- 
banks, whose jargon I could not understand. My little stock 
of money slowly dwindled away, and in ten days my mind was 
ripe for suicide. You must serve an apprenticeship to acquire 
that ripeness. Crowded streets, utter desolation and friend- 
lessness in them, scanty food, and the knowledge that, when 
you have spent all your money and sold your coat and waist- 
coat, you must starve, are the best masters. They produce 
that frame of mind which coroners' juries call " temporary 
insanity." I determined to die. I expended my last coin in 
purchasing laudanum at different chemists' shops — a penny- 
worth at each, which, I said, I wanted for the toothache.; for 
I knew they would not supply a large quantity to a stranger. 
I took my dozen phials home, and poured their contents into a 
broken mug that stood on my washhand stand. I locked the 
door, sat down on my fatal black portmanteau, and tried to 
pray, but I could not. 

It was about nine in the evening in the summer time, and 
the room was in that state of semi-obscurity you call 
" between the lights." While I sat on my black portmanteau, 



312 A DEAD SECEET. 

I heard through, my garret window which was wide open, a 
loud noise ; a confusion of angry voices, in which I could not 
distinguish one word I could comprehend. The noise was 
followed by a pistol-shot. I hear it now, as distinctly as 
I heard it twenty years ago, and then another. As I looked 
out of the window I saw a pair of hands covered with blood, 
clutching the sill, and I heard a voice imploring help for God's 
sake ! Scarcely knowing what I did, I drew up from the 
leads below and into the room the body of a man, whose face 
was one mass of blood — like a crimson mask. He stood 
upright on the floor when I had helped him in, his face 
glaring at me like the spot one sees after gazing too long at 
the sun. Then he began to stagger, and went reeling about 
the room, catching at the window curtain, the table, the wall, 
and leaving traces of his blood wherever he went — I following 
him in an agony — until he fell face-foremost on the bed. 

I lit a candle as well as I could. He was quite dead. His 
features were so scorched and mangled, and drenched, tha 
not one trait was to be distinguished. The pistol must hav 
been discharged full in his face, for some of his long black 
hair was burnt off. He held, clasped in his left hand, a pistol 
which evidently had been recently discharged. 

I sat by the side of this horrible object twenty minutes or 
more, waiting for the alarm which I thought must necessarily 
follow, and resolving what I should do. But all was as silent 
as the grave. No one in the house seemed to have heard the 
pistol-shot, and no one without seemed to have heeded it. I 
looked from the window, but the dingy mass of roofs and 
chimneys had grown black with night, and I could perceive 
nothing moving. Only, as I held my candle out of the window 
it mirrored itself dully in a pool of blood on the leads below. 

I began to think I might be accused of the murder of this 
unknown man. I, who had so lately courted a violent death, 
began to fear it. and to shake like an aspen at the thought of 
the gallows. Then I tried to persuade myself that it was all 
a horrible dream; but there, on the bed, was the dreadful 
dead man in his blood, and all about the room were the marks 
of his gory fingers. 

I began to examine the body more minutely. The dead 
man was almost exactly of my height and stoutness. Of his 



l 



A DEAD SECRET. 313 

age I could not judge. His hair was long and black like 
mine. In one of his pockets I found a pocket-book, containing 
a mass of closely -written sheets of very thin paper, in a 
character utterly incomprehensible to me ; moreover, there 
was a roll of English bank-notes to a very considerable 
amount. In his waistcoat pocket was a gold watch ; and, in 
a silken girdle round his waist, were two hundred English 
sovereigns aud louis d'ors. 

What fiend stood at my elbow while I made this examina- 
tion I know not. The plan I fixed upon was not long 
revolved in my mind. It seemed to start up matured, like 
Minerva, from the head of Jupiter. I was resolved. The 
dead should be alive, and the live man dead. In less time 
than it takes to tell, I had stripped the body, dressed it in my 
own clothes, assumed the dead man's garments, and secured 
the pocket-book, the watch, and the money about my person. 
Then I overturned the lighted candle on to the bed, slouched 
my hat over my eyes, and stole down-stairs. No man met me 
on the stairs, and I emerged into the court. No man pursued 
me, and I gained the open street. It was only an hour after, 
perhaps, as I crossed Holborn towards St. Andrew's Church 
that I saw fire-engines come rattling along ; and, asking 
unconcernedly where the fire was, heard that it was " some- 
where off Gray's Inn Lane." 

I slept nowhere that night. I scarcely remember what I 
did; but I have an indistinct remembrance of flinging 
sovereigns about in blazing gas-lit taverns. It is a marvel to 
me now that I did not become senseless with liquor, un- 
accustomed as I was to dissipation. The next morning I 
read the following paragraph in a newspaper : — ■ 

" Awful Suicide and fire near Gray's Inn Lane. — Last night the 
inhabitants of Cragg's Court, Hustle Street, Gray's Inn Lane, were alarmed 
by volumes of smoke issuing from the windows of No. 5 in that court, occupied 
as a lodging-bouse. On Mr. Plose, the landlord, entering a garret on the third 
floor, it was found that its tenant, Mr. — , had committed suicide by blowing 
his brains out with a pistol, which was found tightly clenched in the wretched 
man's hand. Either from the ignition of the wadding, or from some other- 
cause, the fire had communicated to the bed-clothes ; all of which, with the 
bed and a portion of the furniture, were consumed. The engines of the North 
of England Fire Brigade were promptly on the spot ; and the fire was with 
great difficulty at last successfully extinguished ; little beyond the room 
occupied by the deceased being injured. The body and face of the miserable 



314 A DEAD SECRET. 

suicide were frightfully mutilated ; but sufficient evidence was afforded from 
his clothes and papers to establish, his identity. No cause is assigned for the 
rash act ; and it is even stated that if he had prolonged his existence a few 
hours later he would have come into possession of a fortune of 30,000?., his 
uncle Grripple Collerer, Esq., of Raglan Street, Clerkenwell, having died only 
two days before, and having constituted him his sole heir and legatee. That 
active and intelligent parish officer, Mr. Pybus, immediately forwarded the 
necessary intimation to the Coroner, and the inquest will be held this evening 
at the Kiddy's Arms, Hustle Street." 

I had lost all — name, existence, 30,000£., everything — for 
about 400Z. in gold and notes. 

" So, I suppose," I said, as he who was hanged paused, 
" that you gave yourself up with a view of re-establishing 
your identity ; and, failing to do that, you were hanged for 
murder or arson ?" 

I waited for a reply. He had lit another cigar, and sat 
smoking it. Seeing that he was calm, I judged it best not to 
excite or aggravate him by further questioning, but stayed 
his pleasure. I had not to wait long. 

" Not so," he resumed; "what I became that night I have 
remained ever since, and am now : that is, if I am anything 
at all. The very day on which that paragraph appeared, I 
set off by the coach. My only wish was to get as far from 
London and from England as I possibly could ; and in due 
time, we came to Hull. Hearing that Hamburg was the 
nearest foreign port, to Hamburg I went. I lived there for 
six months in an hotel, frugally and in solitude, and endea- 
vouring to learn German; for, on narrower examination of 
the papers in the pocket-book, I guessed some portions of 
them to be written in that language. I was a dull scholar ; 
but, at the end of six months, I had scraped together enough 
German to know that the dead man's name was Muller ; that 
he had been in Russia, in France, and in America. I 
managed to translate portions of a diary he had kept while in 
this latter country ; but they only related to his impressions 
of the towns he had visited. He often alluded too, casually, 
to his ' secret ' aud his ' charge ' ; but what that secret and 
that charge were, I could not discover. There were also hints 
about a 'shepherdess,' an ' antelope,' and a ' blue tiger' — 
fictitious names I presumed for some persons with whom he 
was connected. The great mass of the documents was in a 



I 



A DEAD SECRET. 315 

cipher utterly inexplicable to my most strenuous ingenuity 
and research. I went by the name of Miiller ; but I found 
that there were hundreds more Miillers in Hamburg, and no 
man sought me out. 

I was in the habit of going every evening to a large beer- 
house outside the town, to smoke my pipe. There generally 
sat at the same table with me a little fat man in a grey great- 
coat, who smoked and drank beer incessantly. I was suspicious 
and shy of strangers ; but, between this little man and me 
there gradually grew up a quiet kind of tavern acquaintance. 

One evening, when we had had a rather liberal potation of 
pipes and beer, he asked me if I had ever tasted the famous 
Baerische or Bavarian beer, adding, that it threw all other 
German beers into the shade, and liberally offering to pay for 
a flask of it. I was in rather merry humour, and assented. We 
had one bottle of Bavarian beer ; then another, and another, 
till, what with the beer and the pipes and the wrangling of 
the domino players, my head swam. 

" I tell you what," said my companion, " we will just have 
one chopine of brandy. I always take it after Baerische 
beer. We will not have it here, but at the Grime Gans hard 
by ; which is an honest house, kept by Max Bombach, who 
is a widow's son." 

I was in that state when a man having already had too 
much is sure to want more, and I followed the man in the 
grey coat. How many chopines of brandy I had at the Grime 
Gans I know not ; but I found myself in bed next morning 
with an intolerable thirst and a racking headache. My first 
action was to spring out of bed, and search in the pocket of 
my coat for my pocket book. It was gone. The waiters and 
the landlord were summoned; but no one knew anything 
about it. I had been brought home in a carriage, very 
inebriated, by a stout man in a grey great-coat, who said he 
was my friend, helped me up-stairs, and assisted me to un- 
dress. The investigation ended with a conviction that the 
man in the grey coat was the thief. He had manifestly been 
tempted to the robbery by no pecuniary motive; for the whole 
of my remaining stock of bank-notes, which I always kept in 
the pocket-book, I found in my waistcoat pocket neatly 
rolled up. 



316 A DEAD SECRET. 

That evening I walked down to the beer-house where I 
usually met my friend — not with the remotest idea of seeing 
him, but with the hope of eliciting some information as to 
who and what he was. 

To my surprise he was sitting at his accustomed table, 
smoking and drinking as usual ; and to my stern salutation, 
replied with a good humoured hope that my head was not 
any the worse for the hranntwein overnight. 

" I want a word with you," said I. 

"With pleasure," he returned. Whereupon he put on his 
broad-brimmed hat and followed me into the garden behind 
the house, with an alacrity that was quite surprising. 

" I was drunk last night," I commenced. 

" Zo" he replied, with an unmoved countenance. 

"And while drunk," I continued, " 1 was robbed of my 
pocket-book." 

" Zo," he repeated, with equal composure. 

" And I venture to assert that you are the person who 
stole it." 

" Zo. You are quite right, my son," he returned, with the 
most astonishing coolness. " I did take your pocket-book ; I 
have it here. See." 

He tapped the breast of his grey great-coat ; and, I coulc 
clearly distinguish, through the cloth, the square form of nrj 
pocket-book with its great clasp in the middle. I sprang at him 
immediately, with the intention of wrenching it from him; 
but he eluded my grasp nimbly, and, stepping aside, drew 
forth a small silver whistle, on which he blew a shrill note. 
In an instant a cloak or sheet was thrown over my head. I 
felt my hands muffled with soft but strong ligatures ; and, 
before I had time to make one effort in self-defence, I was 
lifted off my feet and swiftly conveyed away, in total darkness. 
Presently we stopped, and I was lifted still higher ; was 
placed on a seat; a door was slammed to; and the rumbling 
motion of "wheels convinced me that I was in a carriage. 

My journey must have lasted some hours. We stopped 
from time to time : to change horses I suppose. At the com- 
mencement of the journey I made frantic efforts to disengage 
myself, and to cry out. But I was so well gagged, and bound, 
and muffled, that in sheer weariness and despair, I desisted. 



A DEAD SECRET. 317 

We halted at last for good. I was lifted out, and again 
carried swiftly along for upwards of ten minutes. Then, 
from a difficulty of respiration, I concluded that I had entered 
a house, and was perhaps being borne along some under- 
ground passage. We ascended and descended staircases. I 
heard doors locked and unlocked. Finally, I was thrown 
violently down on a hard surface. The gag was removed 
from my mouth, and the mufflers from my hands ; I heard 
a heavy door clang to, and I was at liberty to speak and to 
move. 

My first care was to disengage myself from the mantle, 
whose folds still clung around me. I was in total darkness — 
darkness so black, that at first I concluded some infernal 
device had been made use of to blind me. But, after strain- 
ing my eyes in every direction, I was able to discern high 
above me a small circular orifice, through which permeated a 
minute thread of light. Then I became sensible that I was 
not blind, but in some subterranean dungeon. The surface 
on which I was lying was hard and cold — a stone pavement. 
I crawled about, feeling with my hands, endeavouring to 
define the limits of my prison. Nothing was palpable to the 
touch, but the bare smooth pavement, and the bare smooth 
walls. I tried for hours to find the door, but could not. I 
shouted for help ; but no man came near me. 

I must have lain in this den two days and two nights — 
at least the pangs of hunger and thirst made me suppose 
that length of time to have elapsed. Then the terrible 
thought possessed me that I was imprisoned there to be 
starved to death. In the middle of the third day, as it 
seemed to me, however, I heard a rattling of keys; one 
grated in the lock ; a door opened, a flood of light broke 
in upon me; and a well-remembered voice cried " Come 
out ! " as one might do to a beast in a cage. 

The light was so dazzling that I could not at first dis- 
tinguish anything. But I crawled to the door; and then, 
standing up, found I was in a small courtyard, and that 
opposite to me was my enemy, the man of the grey coat. 

In a grey coat no longer, however. He was dressed in 
a scarlet jacket, richly laced with gold; which fitted him 
so tightly with the short tails sticking out behind, that, 



318 A DEAD SECRET. 

under any other circumstances, he would have seemed to 
me inconceivably ridiculous. He took no more notice of 
me than if he had never seen me before in his life ; but, 
merely motioning to two servants in scarlet liveries to take 
hold of me under the arms, waddled on before. 

"We went in and out of half-a-dozen doors, and traversed as 
many small courtyards. The buildings surrounding them 
were all in a handsome style of architecture ; and in one of 
them I could discern, through the open grated windows on the 
ground noor, several men in white caps and jackets. A distant 
row of copper stewpans, and a delicious odour, made me con- 
jecture that we were close to the kitchen. We stopped some 
moments in this neighbourhood,- whether from previous 
orders, or from pure malignity towards me, I was unable then 
to tell. He glanced over his shoulder with an expression of 
such infinite malice, that what with himger and rage I 
struggled violently but unsuccessfully to burst from my guards. 
At last we ascended a narrow but handsomely carpeted stair- 
case ; and, after traversing a splendid picture gallery, entered 
an apartment luxuriously furnished ; half library and half 
drawing-room. 

A cheerful wood fire crackled on the dogs in the fire-place ; 
and, with his back towards it, stood a tall elderly man, his 
thin grey hair carefully brushed over his 'forehead. He was 
dressed in black, had a stiff white neckcloth, and a parti- 
coloured ribbon at his buttonhole. A few feet from him was 
a table, covered with books and papers ; and sitting thereat in 
a large arm-chair, was an old man, immensely corpulent, 
swathed in a richly furred dressing-gown, with a sort of jockey 
cap on his head of black velvet, to which was attached a 
hideous green shade. The servants brought me to the foot of 
this table, still holding my arms. 

" Monsieur Muller," said the man in black, politely, and in 
excellent English. " How do you feel ? " 

I replied, indignantly, that the state of my health was not 
the point in question. I demanded to know why I had been 
trepanned, robbed, and starved. 

" Monsieur Muller," returned the man in black, with im- 
movable politeness. " You must excuse the apparently uncour- 
teous manner in which you have -been treated. The truth is, 



A DEAD SECRET. 319 

our house was built, not for a prison, but for a palace ; and, 
for want of proper dungeon accommodation, we were compelled 
to utilise for the moment an apartment which I believe was 
formerly a wine-cellar. I hope you did not find it damp." 

The man with the green shade shook his fat shoulders, as if 
in silent laughter. 

" In the first instance, Monsieur," resumed the other, 
politely motioning me to be silent ; for I was about to speak, 
" we deemed that the possession of the papers in your pocket- 
book" (he touched that fatal book as he spoke) " would have 
been sufficient for the accomplishment of the object we have 
in view. But, finding that a portion of the correspondence is 
in a cipher of which you alone have the key, we judged the 
pleasure of your company absolutely indispensable." 

" I know no more about the cipher and its key than you do," 
I ejaculated, " and, before heaven, no secret that can concern 
you is in my keeping." 

" You must be hungry, Monsieur Muller," pursued the man 
in black, taking no more notice of what I had said than if I 
had not spoken at all. " Carol, bring in lunch." 

He, lately of the grey-coat, now addressed as Carol, bowed, 
retired, and presently returned with a tray covered with smok- 
ing viands and two flasks of wine. The servants half loosened 
their hold ; my heart leapt within me, and I was about to 
rush towards the viands, when the man in black raised his 
hand. 

" One moment, Monsieur Muller," he said, " before you 
recruit your strength. Will you oblige me by answering one 
question, Where is the child ? " 

" Ja, where is the child?" echoed the man in the green 
shade. 

" I do not know," I replied, passionately; "on my honour 
I do not know. If you were to ask me for a hundred years, 
I could not tell you." 

" Carol," said the man in black, with an unmoved counte- 
nance, " take away the tray. Monsieur Muller has no appe- 
tite. Unless," he added turning to me, "you will be so good 
as to answer that little question." 

" I cannot," I repeated; " I don't know, I never knew." 

" Carol," said my questioner, taking up a newspaper, and 



320 A DEAD SECRET. 

turning his back upon me, " take away the things. Monsieur 
Muller, good morning." 

In spite of my cries and struggles I was dragged away. 
We traversed the picture gallery ; but, instead of descending 
the staircase, entered another suite of apartments. We were 
crossing a long vestibule lighted with lamps, and one of my 
guards had stopped to unlock a door while the other lagged a 
few paces behind, (they had loosened their hold of me, and 
Carol was not with us,) when a panel in the wainscot opened, 
and a lady in black — perhaps thirty years of age and beauti- 
ful — bent forward through the aperture. " I heard all," she 
said, in a rapid whisper. " You have acted nobly. Be proof 
against their temptations, and Heaven will reward your 
devotedness." 

I had no time to reply, for the door was closed immediately. 
I was hurried forward through room after room ; until at last 
we entered a small bed-chamber simply, but cleanly. furnished. 
Here I was left, and the door was locked and barred on the 
outside. On the table were a small loaf of black bread, and 
a pitcher of water. Both of these I consumed ravenously. 

I was left without further food for another entire day and 
night. From my window, which was heavily grated, I could 
see that my room overlooked the court-yard where the kitchen 
was, and the sight of the cooks, and the smell of the hot meat 
drove me almost mad. 

On the second day I was again ushered into the presence of 
the man in black, and the man with the green shade. Again 
the infernal drama was played. Again I was tempted with 
rich food. Again, on my expressing my inability to answer 
the question, it was ordered to be removed. 

" Stop ! " I cried desperately, as Carol was about to remove 
the food, and thinking I might satisfy them with a falsehood ; 
" I win confess. I wiU teU all." 

" Speak," said the man in black, eagerly, " where is the 
child ? " 

" In Amsterdam," I replied at random. 

" Amsterdam — nonsense ! " said the man in the green shade 
impatiently, " what has Amsterdam to do with the Blue 
Tiger?" 

" I need not remind you," said the man in black, sarcastic- 



A DEAD SECRET. 321 

ally, " that the name of any town or country is no answer to 
the question. You know as well as I do that the key to the 
whereabouts of the child is there," and he pointed to the 
pocket-book. 

" Yes ; there" echoed the man in the green shade. And he 
struck it. 

" But, sir — " I urged. 

The answer was simply, "Good morning, Monsieur Muller." 

Again was I conducted back to my prison ; again I met the 
lady in black, who administered to me the barren consolation 
that " Heaven would reward my devotedness." Again I found 
the black loaf and the pitcher of water, and again I was left 
a day and a night in semi-starvation, to be again brought 
forth, tantalised, questioned, and sent back ag^ain. 

" Perhaps," remarked the man in black, at the fifth of these 
interviews, "it is gold that Monsieur Muller requires. See." 
As he spoke, he opened a bureau crammed with bags of money, 
and bade me help myself. 

In vain I protested that all the gold in the world could not 
extort from me a secret which I did not possess. In vain I 
exclaimed that my name was not Muller ; in vain I disclosed 
the ghastly deceit I had practised. The man in black only 
shook his head, smiled incredulously, and told me — while com- 
plimenting me for my powers of invention — that my statement 
confirmed his conviction that I knew where the child was. 

After the next interview, as I was returning to my star- 
vation meal of bread and water, the lady in black again 
met me. 

" Take courage," she whispered. " Your deliverance is at 
hand. You are to be removed to-night to a lunatic asylum." 

How my. translation to a mad-house could accomplish my 
deliverance, or better my prospects, did not appear very clear 
to me ; but that very night I was gagged, my arms were con- 
fined in a strait waistcoat, and I was placed in a carriage, which 
immediately set off at a rapid pace. We travelled all night ; 
and, in the early morning, arrived at a large stone building. 
Here I was stripped, examined, placed in a bath, and dressed 
in a suit of coarse grey cloth. I asked where I was ? 1 was 
told in the Alienation Refuge of the Grand Duchy of Sachs- 
Pfeigiger. 



322 A DEAD SECRET. 

" Can I see the head-keeper? " I asked. 

The Herr-ober-Direktor was a little man with a shiny bald 
head and very white teeth. When I entered his cabinet he 
received me politely, and asked me what he could do for me ? 
I told him my real name, my history, my wrongs, that I was 
a British subject, and demanded my liberty. He smiled and 
simply called — " Where is Kraus ? " 

" Here, Herr," answered the keeper. 

" What number is Monsieur ? " 

" Number ninety-two." 

" Ninety-two," repeated the Herr Direktor, leisurely writing. 
" Cataplasms on the soles of the feet. Worsted blisters 
behind the ears, a mustard plaster on the chest, and ice on the 
head. Let it be Baltic ice." 

The abominable inflictions thus ordered were all applied. 
The villain Kraus tortured me in every imaginable way ; and 
in the midst of his tortures, would repeat, " Tell me where 
the child is, Muller, and you shall have your liberty in half- 
an-hour." 

I was' in the madhouse for six months. If I complained to 
the doctor of Kraus' s ill-treatment and temptations, he imme- 
diately began to order cataplasms and Baltic ice. The bruises 
I had to show were ascribed to injuries I had myself inflicted 
in fits of frenzy. The maniacs with whom I was caged declared, 
like all other maniacs, that I was outrageously mad. 

One evening, as I lay groaning on my bed, Kraus entered 
my cell. "Get up," he said, "you are at liberty. I was 
bribed, by you know who, with 10,000 Prussian thalers to 
get your secret from you, if I could ; but I have been bribed 
with 20,000 Austrian florins (which is really a sum worth 
having) to set you free. I shall lose my place, and have to 
fly ; but 1 will open an hotel at Frankfort for the Englanders, 
and make my fortune. Come! " He led me down stairs, let 
me out of a private door in the garden ; and, placing a bundle 
of clothes and a purse in my hand, bade me good night. 

I dressed myself, threw away the madman's livery, and 
kept walking along until morning, when I came to the custom- 
house barrier of another Grand Duchy. I had a passport 
ready provided for me in the pocket of my coat, which was 
found to be perfectly en regie, and I passed unquestioned. I 



A DEAD SECKE-T. 323 

went that morning to the coach-office of the town, and engaged 
a place in the Eilwagen to some German town, the name of 
which I forget ; and at the end of four days' weary travelling, 
I reached Brussels. 

I was very thin and weak with confinement and privation ; 
but I soon recovered my health and strength. I must say that 
I made up by good living for my former compulsory absti- 
nence ; and both in Brussels and in Paris, to which I next 
directed my steps, I lived on the best. One evening I entered 
one of the magnificent restaurants in the Palais Royal to dine. 
I had ordered my meal from the carte, when my attention was 
roused by a small piece of paper which had been slipped 
between its leaves. It ran thus : — 

" Feign to eat, but eat no fish. Remain the usual time at your dinner, to 
disarm suspicion, "but immediately afterwards make your way to England. 
Be sure, in passing through London, to call on Hildehurger." 

I had ordered a sole au gratin; but when it arrived, 
managed to throw it piece by piece under the table. When 
I had discussed the rest of my dinner, I summoned the 
garcon, and asked for my bill. 

"You will pay the head waiter, if you please, Monsieur," 
said he. 

The head waiter came. If he had been a centaur or a 
sphynx, I could not have stared at him with more horror and 
astonishment than I did ; for there, in a waiter's dress, with 
a napkin over his arm, was Carol, the man of the grey coat. 

"Miiller," he said, coolly, bending over the table, "your 
sole was poisoned. Tell me where the child is, and here is 
an antidote, and four hundred thousand francs." 

For reply I seized the heavy water decanter, and dashed it 
with all the force I could command, full in the old ruffian's 
face. He fell like a stone, amid the screams of women, the 
oaths of men, and cries of a la Garde ! a la Garde ! I slipped 
out of the restaurant and into one of the passages of outlets 
which abound in the Palais Royal. Whether the man died 
or not, or whether I was pursued, I never knew. I gained 
my lodgings unmolested, packed up my luggage, and started 
the next morning by the diligence, for Boulogne. 

t 2 



324 A DEAD SECRET. 

I arrived in due time in London ; but I did not call on 
" Hildeburger," because I did not know who or where 
Hildeburger was. I started the very evening of my arrival 
in London for Liverpool, being determined to go to America. 
I was fearful of remaining in England, not only on account 
of my persecutors, but because I was pursued everywhere by 
the spectre of the real Muller. 

I took my passage to New York in a steamer which was to 
sail from the Docks in a week's time. It was to start on a 
Monday • and on the Friday preceding I was walking about 
the Exchange, congratulating myself that I should soon have 
the Atlantic between myself and my pursuers. All at once 
I heard the name of Muller pronounced in a loud tone close 
behind me. I turned, and met the gaze of a tall thin young 
man with a downy moustache, who was dressed in the extreme 
of fashion, and was sucking the end of an ebony stick. 

" Monsieur Muller," he said, nodding to me easily. 

" My name is not Muller," I answered, boldly. 

"You have not yet called on Hildeburger," he added, 
slightly elevating his eyebrows at my denial. 

I felt a cold shiver pass over me, and stammered, 
«N— n— no!" 

"We had considerable difficulty in learning your where- 
abouts ? " he went on with great composure. " The lady 
was obstinate. The screw and the water were tried in vain ; 
but at length, by a judicious use of the cord and pulleys, we 
succeeded." 

I shuddered again. 

"Will you call on Hildeburger now?" he resumed, quickly 
and sharply. "He is here — close by." 

"Not now, not now," I faltered. " Some other time." 

" The day after to-morrow ? " 

"Yes, yes," I answered eagerly, "the day after to-morrow." 

" Well, Saturday be it. You will meet me here, at four in 
the afternoon! Good ! Do not forget. Au revoir, Monsieur 
Muller." 

He had no sooner uttered these words than he turned and 
disappeared among the crowd of merchants on 'Change. 

I could not doubt, by his naming Saturday as the day for 
our meeting, that he had some inkling of my intended 



A DEAD SECRET. 325 

departure. Although I had paid my passage to New York, 
I determined to forfeit it, and to change my course so as to 
evade my persecutors. I entered a shipping-office, and learnt 
that a good steamer would leave George's Dock at ten that 
same night, for Glasgow. And to Glasgow for the present I 
made up my mind to go. 

At a quarter before ten I was at the dock with my luggage. 
It was raining heavily, and there was a dense fog. 

" This way for the Glasgow steamer — this way," cried a 
man in a Guernsey shirt, " this way, your honour. I'll carry 
your trunk ! " 

He took up my trunk as he spoke, and led the way down a 
ladder, across the decks of two or three steamers, and to the 
gangway of a fourth, where a man stood with dark bushy 
whiskers, dressed in a pea-coat, and holding a lighted lantern. 

" Is this the Glasgow steamer ? " I asked. 

" All right ! " answered the man with the lantern. " Look 
sharp, the bell's a-going to ring." 

" Remember poor Jack, your honour," said the man in the 
Guernsey, who had carried my trunk. I gave him sixpence 
and stepped on board. A bell began to ring, and there was 
great confusion on board with hauling of ropes and stowing 
of luggage. The steamer seemed to me to be intolerably 
dirty and crowded with goods; and, to avoid the crush, I 
stepped aft to the wheel. In due time we had worked out of 
the dock and were steaming down the Mersey. 

" How long will the run to Glasgow take, think you, my 
man ? " I asked of the man at the wheel. He stared at me 
as if he did not understand me, and muttered some unin- 
telligible words. I repeated the question. 

" He does not speak English," said a voice at my elbow, 
"nor can any soul on board this vessel, except you and I, 
Monsieur Muller." 

I turned round, and saw to my horror the young man with 
the ebony cane and the downy moustache. 

"I am kidnapped!" I cried. "Let me have a boat. 
Where is the captain ? " 

" Here is the captain," said the young man, as a fiercely 
bearded man came up the companion-ladder. " Captain 
Miloschvich of the Imperial Russian ship Pyroscaphe, bound 



320 A DEAD SECRET. 

to St. Petersburg, M. Muller. As Captain Miloschvich speaks 
no English, you will permit me to act as interpreter." 

Although I feared from his very presence that my case was 
already hopeless, I entreated him to explain to the captain 
that there was a mistake ; that I was bound for Glasgow, and 
that I desired to be set on shore directly. 

" Captain Miloschvich," said the young man, when he had 
translated my speech, and received the captain's answer, 
" begs you to understand that there is no mistake ; that you 
are not bound for Glasgow, but for St. Petersburg ; and that 
it is quite impossible for him to set you on shore here, seeing 
that he has positive instructions to set you on shore in 
Cronstadt. Furthermore, he feels it his duty to add that 
should you, by any words or actions, attempt to annoy or 
disturb the crew or passengers, he will be compelled to put 
you in irons, and place you in the bottom of the hold." 

The captain frequently nodded during these remarks, as if 
he perfectly understood their purport, although unable to 
express them ; and, to intimate his entire coincidence, he 
touched his wrists and ankles. 

If I had not been a fool I should 'have resigned myself to 
my fate. But I was so maddened with misfortune, that I 
sprang on the young man, hoping to kill him, or to be killed 
myself and to be thrown into the sea. But I was chained, 
beaten, and thrown into the hold. There, among tarred 
ropes, the stench of tallow-casks, and the most appalling 
sea- sickness, I lay for days, fed with mouldy biscuit and 
putrid water ! At length we arrived at Cronstadt. 

All I can tell you or I know of Russia is, that somewhere 
in it there is a river, and on that river a fortress, and in that 
fortress a cell, and in that cell a knout. Seven years of my 
existence were passed in that cell, under the lashes of that 
knout, with the one horrible question dinning in my ears, 
"Where is the child?" 

How I escaped to incur worse tortures it is bootless to tell 
you. I have swept the streets of Palermo as a convict, in a 
hideous yellow dress. I have pined in the Inquisition at 
Rome. I have been caged in the madhouse at Constantinople, 
with the rabble to throw stones and mud at me through the 
bars. I have been branded in the back in the baqnes of 












A DEAD SECRET. 327 

Toulon and Rochfort ; and everywhere I have been offered 
liberty and gold, if I would answer the question, " Where is 
the child?" At last, having been accused of a crime I did 
not commit, I was condemned to death. Upon the scaffold 
they asked me, "Where is the child?" Of course there 

could be no answer, and I was 

Just then, Margery, my servant, who never will have the 
discrimination to deny me to importunate visitors, knocked at 
the door, and told me that I was wanted in the surgery. I 
went down stairs, and found Mrs. Walkingshaw, Johnny 
Walkingshaw's wife, who told me that her " master " was 
" took all over like," and quite " stroaken of a heap." 
Johnny Walkingshaw is a member of the ancient order of 
Sylvan Brothers; and, as I am club doctor to the Sylvan 
Brothers, he has a right to my medical attendance for the 
sum of four shillings a year. Whenever he has taken an 
overdose of rough cyder, he is apt to be " stroaken all of a 
heap " and to send for me. I was the more annoyed at being 
obliged to walk to Johnny Walkingshaw's cottage at two in 
the morning, because the wretched man had been cut short in 
his story just as he was about to explain the curious surgical 
problem of how he was resuscitated. When I returned he 
was gone, and I never saw him more. Whether he was mad 
and had hanged himself, or whether he was sane and had 
been hanged according to law, or whether he had ever been 
hanged or never been hanged, are points I have never quite 
adjusted in my mind. 



TEN MINUTES "CROSS COUNTRY." 



In the days when railway locomotion was looked upon as 
something highly interesting, but humorously chimerical and 
impracticable, a merry fellow prophesied that ere many years, 
"England would become like a gridiron." A harmless 
enthusiast, this merry fellow, but slightly amenable to those 
commissions de lunatico with which his brother enthusiasts had 
been visited: Salomon de Caus for talking some nonsense 
about steam ; Cyrano de Bergerac for his meanderings in 
aerostation ; and that madcap, Galileo, for raving about the 
movement of the earth. Railroads and thirty miles an hour ! 
How we laughed in our Hessian boots, and Cossack trowsers, 
and high-collared coats, at the absurdity of the thing ; how 
waggish the committees of the House of Commons waxed ; 
and what smart things the Quarterly Review said about steam. 
Somehow, the world hath wagged considerably since then, and 
the prediction of the merry fellow has been, like a great many 
other jovial prophecies, considerably more than accomplished. 
The railway gridiron not only spreads itself over the map ; 
but innumerable little auxiliary bars, called branch lines, 
continue to intersect it; so that the gridiron assumes, day by 
day, more the aspect of — what shall I say ? — a sheet of paper 
on which a centipede, his hundred legs well dipped in ink, 
has been executing a cheerful hornpipe. Am I exaggerating ? 
I call witnesses to disprove the assertion : Bradshaw's railway 
guide, nay, the very stones of the Whistleby .station, which as 
all men know is on the Whistleby, Slocumb, and Dumble- 
downdeary branch of the East Appleshire line, a succursal of 
the great Nornor-eastern trunk line. At this station I find 
myself one Sunday evening provided with a return ticket from 
Whistleby to Babylon Bridge. The up train — so a porter in 
a full suit of velveteen, well oiled, tells me — will be due in 






TEN MINUTES " CROSS COUNTRY." 329 

twenty minutes. The evening being fine, I see no reason 
why I should not take a stroll " cross country." 

This cross country is not strange to me ; for, when I was a 
dweller in the tents of that Dumbledowndeary of which I 
have already been bold enough to speak, I frequently wandered 
from thence to Whistleby, and from Whistleby through that 
cross country which includes in its circuit, two or three 
villages, and many farms. Whither shall my walk be now ? 
Two miles away, along green lanes, running between orchards 
and at the foot of a hill, in a hollow so deep as to be almost 
like a pit, lies Codlingford. A lovely little village it is, though 
unhealthy through its situation — so unhealthy, indeed, that it 
was decimated by the cholera, till the frightened villagers 
rolled blazing tar-barrels down the steep street to drive the 
maleficent vapours away. Not hither will I walk now, how- 
ever ; for two great silk-printing factories, with tier above tier 
of windows in distressing regularity, mar the otherwise 
charming landscape : tall chimneys tower over the pent-house 
roofs and swinging inn signs; and streams of indigo and 
cochineal discolour the once pellucid creek, where I know of 
several trout, and have some suspicion of perch, even. 
Not Codlingford-wise, through which the great Dover road 
runs, and through which it is traditionally reported that 
seventy stage coaches (when there were coaches) passed every 
day, will I bend my steps ; nor shall my walk be to Crabapple 
Heath, an inland Dumbledowndeary in miniature, whose 
inhabitants have run mad on the subject of shops, as those of 
Dumbledowndeary have upon houses, and have erected Im- 
perial tea warehouses, and " Saloons of Fashion," and 
Pantechnicons of wearing apparel, and Berlin wool establish- 
ments, amid the gorse and furze, and almost as " unprofitably 
gay ; " when, goodness knows the one " everything shop " of 
the village, whose proprietor dispensed linendrapery, sweet- 
stuff, ironmongery, Leghorn bonnets, patent medicines, boots 
and shoes, and cheap periodicals, with equal impartiality, was 
quite enough for their simple requirements. The Crab- 
appleians wait for customers, as do the Dumbledowndearians 
for tenants. Neither will I wend my steps to the church, a 
grey old building, with a leaden steeple charmingly out of 
the perpendicular, whose rusted weathercock, all on one side, 



330 TEN MINUTES " CROSS COUNTRY." 

gazes -with, a sort of sleepy astonishment at the bran-new 
railway, running close by, and the little railway cottage iu 
Kentish ragstone where a railway employe passes his time 
between whistling, smoking, and warning off the line any 
stray bullock, which in the absorbing gravity of cud-chewing 
might otherwise stare an express train in the face, and be 
thereby converted into premature beef. This church is well 
worth visiting, though I have not time to tarry there to-day. 
Mr. Gray might have composed his Elegy in the green church- 
yard, where the " rude forefathers of the hamlet sleep ; " or 
in the church where painstaking churchwardens have covered 
rich oak carvings, and stone pilasters, and fretted roof, with 
one unvarying coat of whitewash — and would, I dare say, had 
they had their way, have whitewashed the great squire's pew, 
with its somnolent crimson-covered hassocks and cushions, its 
corpulent prayer-books and Bibles, giving an additional coat 
of priming to the stone tablets erected to worthies who 
nourished 200 years ago, the monumental brasses telling 
of mitred abbots and signet-ringed priors, in the days when 
matins and complins were sung in Dumbledowndeary church, 
and rich copes and dalmatics hung in the little vestry, instead 
of the parson's plain gown and surplice, flanked by the 
" Churchman's Almanack," a paper relating to assessed taxes, 
a box of lucifers, and the clerk's snuff-box. Mr. Gray, I say, 
might have meditated on the tombs of a succession of village 
magnates, " Lords of this Manor of Codlingford," or on the 
great altar-tomb where some pious dame of the olden time 
lies in marble, her hands piously joined, and her feet resting 
on a little dog; or, haply, he might have strolled into the 
belfry, where hang the frayed and faded bell-ropes, and where 
a gaily emblazoned board, like a cheerful hatchment, tells of 
the achievements of the Rochester " youths " in the year of 
grace, 1730, how many bob majors they rang, and how Jesse 
Cotes was tenor. He might have moralised on the little gap 
(like a grave) under the gallery stairs, where the tressels and 
coil of ropes lie ; he might have filled the pulpit with crowds 
of mind-pictured preachers : shaven friars, cowled penitents, 
and stoled bishops; Episcopalians with beard and moustache; 
crop-eared Presbyterians in Geneva band, beating the drum 
ecclesiastic ; red-coated Independents, with Bible in one hand 



TEN MINUTES CROSS COUNTRY." '331 

and broadsword in the other ; smug rectors of Queen Anne's 
time, with rosy gills and cauliflower wigs, upholding Doctor 
Sacheverell ; portly Georgian vicars thundering at the squire 
(slumbering peacefully in his pew) on a question of doctrine 
and tithes. He might have wandered into the churchyard 
again, and listened through the half-opened porch to the 
organ, tenderly handled by the amateur organist (a worthy 
man, and a shoemaker, mundanely speaking) ; or watched the 
sun-dial, whose hands nor Papist nor Calvinist, stout Episco- 
palian nor fierce Nonjuror, had been able to tamper with; and 
gazed at the boats rippling the silver surface of the river, and 
the purple haze from the fields gradually arising to meet a 
blue descending veil from heaven, till the shadows were inde- 
finitely prolonged, and the stars began to shine. 

But I have no call to do this ; for my name is not Gray, 
and I am no poet. I promised myself and you, reader, a 
walk ; and behold, I have been telling you where we are not 
to go, without instructing you as to where our promenade is 
really to be. Shall it be to Abbey wood, whose name is all 
that now remains to recall the once renowned Abbey of 
Pippinham? But I should have my Dugdale with me to 
enjoy properly a walk thither. Sitting by this ruined but 
yet sturdy oak tree, which perchance has sheltered beneath its 
gnarled branches many a cowled and shaven monk in the old 
time, sitting thus with the Monasticon Anglicanum before me, 
there would be voices of the past for me in Pippinham Wood. 
I should live again in the time when there were monks and 
abbeys; for all that distressingly modern public-house yonder, 
with its flourishes about " fine ale," and " Poppins's ginger- 
beer," in lieu of the ancient hostelry, the black-jack, and the 
stoup of Canary ; for all the brutal Vandalism of that brazen 
bill-sticker who has posted a placard of somebody's weekly 
newspaper, price threepence, on a charmingly antique wall, all 
shingle, round pebbles, and moss, a fragment perchance of the 
old abbey : nay, which might have been a borough, God wot, 
returning its burgess to Parliament before the Beform Bill. 

And, while I yet hesitate as to where I shall walk, I see 
" looming in the distance," as Mr. Disraeli would say, a 
wreath of white smoke ; and know that in a very few minutes 
the up train will be due at Whistleby. The bell rings ; I 



332 TEN MINUTES " CROSS COUNTRY." 

hasten to the platform ; Bodlingford, Crabapple Heath, 
Pippinham Wood, and all the cross country are nothing to 
me now, for my time is up, and I am bound for Babylon 
Bridge. 

So, also, at a larger station, and on a longer line do we 
stand, often forgetful that the sands are running through the 
glass. Now proposing to walk, now to ride; now irresolutely 
balancing between a jaunt in yon sleepy-looking one-horse fly, 
and a ride on one of that string of mettlesome hobbyhorses, 
till another bell rings ; and, gliding slowly into the station, 
comes another train, hung with black, whose stoker carries a 
scythe and hour glass, and whose guard a mattock and a 
spade. 



THE DALGETTY EACE. 



We cannot watch this wonderful world in its workings 
without being made sensible, every hour, of the system of — 
not so much reproduction — as re-occurrence. Men, events, 
diseases, wars, passions, combinations occur, lie dormant for 
centuries, and then come on us again, identical. 'Twas a 
beautiful thought of the Italian rhymer, speaking of a great 
man, 

Natura lo fece, e poi ruppe la stampa. 

Nature made Man, and then broke the die. 

The die was broken in moulding Sheridan, as Byron has 
paraphrased it in his monody ; but it is not so actually. The 
mould indeed is broken, crumbled, and is resolved to ashes ; 
but the die remains ; garnered up in Nature's storehouse, and 
it is taken down and cleaned, and turns out a type of the old 
stamp, when Wisdom requires it. The coinage in course of 
time becomes worn, battered, clipped, debased ; it is called in ; 
it will no longer pass current ; but the matrices are kept in 
the great mint, and the mint issues broad, bright, brave pieces 
of the old coinage, from time to time, irregularly and unex- 
pectedly. 

Such issues are evoked partly, I admit, by the temper and 
constitution of the times. As insects come after a shower, 
and a dead carcase gathers ravens, and a house in Chancery 
fosters spiders; so, had we a weak bigoted priestridden 
sovereign, should we have a plentiful supply of the old king- 
cardinal coinage of the famous Wolsey, Richelieu, Mazarin, 
Alvarez, Ximenes pattern. Wiih another Covenant we should 
have, I hope, another Cromwell ; another Napoleon would 
bring with him another band of marshals as famous as the 
last ; another Louis Quinze would assuredly provoke another 



384 THE DALGETTY RACE. 

Damiens ; another Voltaire, another Robespierre in reversion ; 
and I am sanguine enough to believe that a few years' con- 
tinuance of any future war in which we may unhappily chance to 
be engaged, would give us another Nelson on the sea, another 
Wellington on the land — red tape, routine, my lords, and 
" under consideration," notwithstanding. After all (Solomon, 
the king of critics, has said it before), the theatre of the world 
has not an unlimited repertory. Darby and Joan was written 
before Katharine and Petruchio ; Clytemnestra is older than 
Lady Macbeth. There can be no novelty in the drama of life 
but the last scene, and the rehearsal, even of that, is deferred 
till further notice. 

I happened to mention casually the contingency of war. 
That brings me to the subject of. this paper. Events, naturally 
including wars and the rumours thereof, do, according to my 
theory, turn up, from time to time, as scorise are thrown up 
when Vesuvius loses its temper. And the men-types turn up 
in like fashion. We have thought them dead, we have 
thought them extinct, we have thought that the breed has 
quite died out, like the ibis and the dodo ; but they have been 
lying snugly perdu somewhere during times of desuetude, and 
now start up'and cry " Ready, aye ready !" like any Napiers. 
Give me the' event, I will find the men. There is, I am certain, 
a law-copying clerk somewhere in Cripplegate ready to cast 
aside his parchments ; and, no longer mute inglorious, to write 
Paradise Lost or the Defence of the People of England, to the 
admiration of the world and the confusion of Salmasius, if you 
will only grant me a commonwealth and a high court of justice. 
I can find dozens of Robespierres in back attics ready to 
renounce small clothes, to celebrate the Feast of Reason, and 
to demand your head, my lud, to-morrow. There are commu- 
nist cobblers in cellars who only lack the opportunity to be 
Marats; ay, and in quiet country towns there are dreamy 
young women who only wait the trumpet-call of the Event, to 
start up Charlotte Cordays and slay the Marats in their baths. 
If Charles the Second were alive to-morrow, do you think he 
would have much difficulty in finding a young lady among the 
corps de ballet willing and ready to be created Duchess of 
Cleveland? There is an old lady in Camden Town, house- 
keeper to a poor old gouty grand monarque of a single gen- 



THE DALGETTY RACE. 335 

tleman — give me but a real Yersailles and a real Louis Quatorze 
iu his dotage, and see how soon she would be metamorphosed 
into a real Madame de Maintenon ! I know Salomon de Caus 
well. He has just discovered the perpetual motion, and only- 
wants funds to complete his self-navigating aerial machine. 
People say he is mad. Just leave the doors of the jewel- 
office open, and see how soon my acquaintance Colonel Blood 
(from Camberwell) will steal the regalia. All these types 
always exist. The Causes Celebres are musty, decayed volumes ; 
yet in peaceable English homesteads there are the same 
poisoners now. The Borgias are alive in gingham and cordu- 
roy ; the aqua to/ana is brewed in earthen mugs, and bought, 
in penn'orths, at the chemists ; every burial club may have its 
Brinvilliers ; every assurance office knows who killed Sir 
Thomas Overbury, and how Sir Theodosius Boughton's uncle 
insured his wife's sister's life for five thousand pounds. 

The Crimean war called into being a class of characters who, 
owing to the cankers of a calm world and a long peace, had 
gradually faded from public view, and had been superseded by 
younger sons of younger brothers, decayed tapsters, and reduced 
serving men. Captain Dugald Dalgetty, who since the last great 
peace was annually sinking deeper and deeper into the stagnant 
waters of Lethe ; who had gradually fallen into neglect, mis- 
esteem, obscurity, ridicule, and at length total oblivion ; who 
seemed to have strutted and fretted his hour upon the stage 
till the impatient audience cried " Out ! but (or " Off, off!") 
brief candle !" then suddenly, Belli gratia, re-appeared bloom- 
ing, confident, swaggering, loquacious, valiant, and venally 
faithful — with a new scabbard to his Andrea Ferrara, new 
rivets to his corselet, a fresh feather in his hat, new spurs to 
his heels, and a new saddle and bridle to his doughty steed 
Gustavus Adolphus. That war called forth many things that 
had been slumbering for a quarter of a century in the limbo of 
peace-pipings. The passions of wild beasts, plunder, provost- 
marshals, and baggage-waggon Moll Flagons : — Bellona can 
boast of all these in her train ; and with them rides proudly 
with his long sword ready to thrust for king or kaiser, autocrat 
or republic, stars or stripes, lion and unicorn or double eagle, 
Captain Dugald Dalgetty. 

I can just recollect, twenty odd years ago, one of the old 



336 THE DALGETTY RACE. 

Dalgetty stock, Captain Skanderbeggle. He lived next door to 
us, in a little cottage at Kilburn. He had but one leg ; he 
had a potato snuff-box, given to him — so he said — by General 
Barclay de Tolly ; and his principal occupation was to walk up 
and down his little garden, and swear. He is associated in 
my mind, curiously, with a certain tall sunflower in his garden 
that used to swagger insolently over our palings. Not that 
his face was yellow — it was excessively red. Not that his 
face had no better supporter than a stalk ; for the captain's 
face ended in a shiny black stock, and. was finished off by a 
tightly-buttoned blue surtout and nankeen trousers ; but both 
the flower and the man were arrogant, blustering, self- assert- 
ing, swayed themselves to-and-fro a great deal, and had an 
unmistakeable expression of a resolve not to stand any non- 
sense. Captain Skanderbeggle was good enough to take 
considerable notice of, and rather a fancy to, me; but he 
would not stand any of my nonsense either, and, if I were 
inattentive to the terrific stories he told me, he would hit me 
a smart cuff on the side of the head, which I never dared 
resent or complain of to my nurse, for my ideas of the captain's 
coercive powers over refractory juveniles were illimitable. He 
was more than a threat of Bogey to me ; — he was one of the 
Bogeys themselves. 

A martial life had the captain led. He was of West 
Indian parentage — from Demerara. "Married, a Dutch 
widow, sir," he was wont to say; " fifty thousand guilders, 
and five hundred black fellows. Too much sangaree ! Cut 
up with the yellow fever in six months. Clck ! " (This last 
interjection " Clck ! " he always made use of as a peroration 
to his narratives, whether he had been describing a battle, a 
shipwreck, or a night surprise, the passage of a river, or the 
execution of a deserter.) Captain Skanderbeggle had re- 
ceived his baptism of fire in some bush-fighting among run- 
away slaves in the interior of Guiana. " Lay three days and 
nights in the mud up a creek. Took twenty-seven prisoners, 
hanged nine, gave the ' Spanso bocko ' to eight, and flogged 
and pickled the rest. Took ' Ugly Toby ' the ringleader. 
Brought his head home in a calabash. Promoted to be 
captain of militia on the spot. Governor Flemsburg sitting 
under a banyan tree smoking his pipe. Commission made 



THE DALGETTY RACE. 337 

out there and then. Clck ! " From the West Indies, the 
captain (he had always been a captain), having converted his 
fifty thousand guilders into the familiar ornithological speci- 
men known as " ducks and drakes/' came to Europe, and 
appeared to have held some irregular military employment in 
Ireland during the rebellion in that unhappy country. He 
used to speak with great gusto of certain people called 
Croppies, and of the scourging, half-hanging, pitch-capping, 
and gunpowder singeing, that were necessary to instil proper 
notions of loyalty and the Protestant religion into their minds; 
whence I infer that he had been in the Militia or the Yeo- 
manry. Indeed, I think he once told me that he was adjutant 
in Lord Jocelyn's Fox- hunters ; a corps that unearthed innu- 
merable rebellious foxes (without brushes, and with but two 
legs) in those parlous times. But, as he was always desirous 
of employment in the regular army, he had solicited and 
obtained a commission in the King's German Legion, whence 
he had passed to Lord Beresford's Portuguese Levies, and 
thence to Sir Hudson Lowe's Corsican Bangers, during his 
service in which he had the pride and pleasure to put an end 
to a deadly Corsican vendetta that had been raging for up- 
wards of eighteen months; for, happening to catch one 
Camillo Zamboni, who with a long gun was waiting behind a 
rock for Pietro Pallavecco, him to kill and slay; and cap- 
turing soon afterwards the veritable Pietro, who with a long 
knife was lying in a ditch waiting for the long-gunned Camillo, 
and actuated by similarly murderous intentions towards him 
— he, the astute Skanderbeggle, after reading the first passage 
in the articles of war that turned up, did then and there hang 
both Pietro and Camillo on the next tree, to the complete 
extinction of the feud, and the satisfaction of all parties. 
There was rather a hiatus valde deflendus in the captain's nar- 
rative after this ; and he never satisfactorily accounted for the 
tenure of his brevet-majority in the service of Murat, king of 
Naples, seeing that the brother-in-law of Napoleon was neces- 
sarily at war with us until 1814. How, too, could he have 
been at the battle of the Moskwa as a captain of Polish 
Lancers ; and how from thence did he subside into the Boyal 
Waggon Train, attached to which he went through the cam- 
paign of Waterloo, and to his services in which he owed his 

z 



338 THE DALGETTY RACE. 

modest pension ? Stay : were there not evil-minded people 
who said that he had been broken as an officer in the English 
service, and that his pension accrued from certain delicate 
services he had been able, from his acquaintance with the 
Italian language, to render the English government at Milan, 
about the time of Queen Caroline's trial ? He went over to 
South America after that, and had a brush in the war of 
Independence — on the Royalist Spanish side. They paid, he 
said, with a wink. In India, afterwards, the Nabob of Futty- 
ghur was very much attached to him, and would have made 
him commandant of his artillery, had not the services of 
Skanderbeggle been essential for the organisation of the 
Rajah of Chillumghee's irregular cavalry. At last he grew 
old, and broke, and came to tell his battles o'er again and 
slay the slain thrice over at Kilbum. His sword was turned 
into a bamboo cane, and Gustavus Adolphus (represented by 
an old blind pony he used to drive in a gig) was put out to 
grass. 

I am afraid Captain Skanderbeggle was not a very good man, 
and I don't believe now half the stories he used to tell me of 
his exploits ; but in my childhood I used to think him a very 
Paladin of valour. It struck me, even then, that he used to 
swear and drink brandy enough. I used to try (with that 
glorious privilege of childhood for the personification of 
shadows) to fancy him my uncle Toby. There was a stout 
landlady at the Black Lion opposite who would have made an 
admirable Widow Waclman, and our housemaid was as like 
Bridget as two peas ; but the blustering old captain had 
nothing in common with the modest large-hearted Captain 
Shandy. Had poor Lieutenant Lefevre come that way, he 
might have stopped at the inn, or marched, or gone hang, for 
ever Captain Skanderbeggle would have sent Corporal Trim to 
inquire how he did : indeed, he had no Trim, only a dusty old 
charewoman to wait upon hini, at whom he swore oaths 
enough to tire out the accusing angel's wings as he flew to 
Heaven's chancery to give them in, and blush — not for shame 
at a good man's weakness, but for indignation at an old 
sinner's profanity. He never made any model of the fortifi- 
cations of Dendermond in the garden; — the only point in 
which he resembled the captains that fought in the Low 



THE DALGETTY *RACE. 339 

Countries was in his swearing so terribly ; but lie used to 
hoist a flag on the anniversary of the capture of some strong- 
hold in the East Indies (where he never was, I suspect), and 
smoke Trichinopoly cheroots which he said the Rajah of Chil- 
lumghee had given him, and hallo out fiercely to the little 
vagrant boys, and behave altogether like a terrible old Turk. 
I am sure he was no great scholar ; but if he had never read 
Suwarrow's Soldier's Catechism, he had at least heard, and to 
the full appreciated, the sapient maxim, that " Booty is a holy 
thing," for his house was a museum of trophies he had 
picked up in his wanderings — war-clubs, tomahawks, saddles, 
bridles, old coats, helmets, sabres, horse-cloths, and shakos. 
None of these were valuable — he was more a military marine 
store-keeper than a virtuoso ; but he loved to accumulate 
things, and my friendship with him was brought to a close by 
a misunderstanding between him and my family, arising from 
the impossibility of persuading him to return a mallet and 
handsaw he had borrowed. He insulted us over the palings 
after this, and fired off two-pounders during the time of Divine 
Service on Sundays. Peace be with him ! 

There are not many readers of the rising generation who 
will recognise this offshoot from the Dalgetty tree. The death 
of George the Fourth saw the last of this captain; yet they 
abounded at the period to which I have alluded. If you 
consider the European nature of the last great war, the many 
different powers with whom we were allied, the widely-various 
fields of our military operations, the Dalgetty of that day 
can be understood. 

But there is, or rather was, a captain whom we all recol- 
lect. The captain in the Legion. He had big black whiskers 
(moustachios were not fashionable then, even among military 
men, save cavalry officers) ; his name was Captain de Mont- 
morency Ravelin. He had shed his blood for the Queen 
Isabella Segunda and her exemplary mamma, Marie Christina, 
on the arid plains of Catalonia ; and the ungrateful Isabella 
had neglected to imburse him his large arrears of pay-pension 
and allowances ; which constrained him to get little bills done; 
to hold levees of Jews in his bed-chamber of a morning ; to 
run up terrific scores at hotels ; to occupy whole pages to 
himself in tradesmen's ledgers ; to frequent occult chambers 

z 2 



340 THE DALGETTY RACE. 

where ivory cubes were nightly rattled in cylindrical boxes, 
and seven was the main and five to four were on the caster * 
to be put, in fine, to the thousand shifts and embarrassments 
that a pauper gentleman, utterly unemployed, thoroughly un- 
educated for any useful purpose, hopelessly idle and passably 
debauched, must needs suffer when he cannot dig and when 
to beg he is ashamed. Yes; he had formed one of the 
famous band of heroes recruited from the docks and the slums, 
and officered Heaven and the Insolvent Court only knows how r 
who went out to Spain, and were flogged and not paid, and r 
as wicked wags reported, once ran away en masse from a small 
body of Carlists, who were instructed to cry out "Stop thief!" 
which so terrified the worthy legionaries, that they, remem- 
bering the adage, " the thief doth fear each bush an officer," 
bolted without further delay. Who does not remember these 
poor fellows when they came home, all as tattered and torn as 
the bridegroom of the maiden all forlorn? They begged 
about, they appeared at police offices, they swept the streets 
till the professional beggars found out what a capital dodge 
the legionary one was, and took to stumped brooms and 
ragged red jackets. Who does not recollect the unhappy 
captains — the De Montmorency Ravelins? Every second- 
hand clothes-shop had one of their swallow-tailed scarlet-coats 
hanging up outside, with the Queen of Spain's buttons and 
the Queen of Spain's epaulettes. Some of the Ravelins were 
on the Carlist side, and were in worse case than the Christinos. 
They were the terror of tailors ; lodging-house keepers groaned 
when you mentioned their names ; waiters called them, sar- 
castically, " Capting." The Spanish legionary captain was 
almost as poorly off as a Pole ; and touching the degree of 
estimation in which those unfortunate refugees were held, 
from the year 'thirty-five to forty, I will relate what my aunt 
said. My aunt had a niece who was in love with a handsome 
young man, an artist, but whose name unfortunately ended in 
wowski. Marriage was spoken of, when up and spoke my 
aunt, who never before was heard to speak so harshly and 
said: 

" I hope, my dear, you are not going to marry anybody 
whose name ends in wowski, because he must be a Pole, and 
many of them, I hear, are swindlers." 



THE DALGETTY RACE. 341 

And my aunt was a dear good woman, who would not have 
harmed a worm, or spoken disrespectfully of a Barbary 
monkey. 

About this time, too, the stage took up the captain and 
made much sport of him. The playwrights converted him, 
invariably, into an Irishman, gave him a blue-frogged coat, 
brass spurs, white trousers, and false moustachio's, one of 
which last came off towards the denouement. He was always an 
intriguing adventurer, had frequently been transported, ordi- 
narily passed under a false name, and was generally removed 
in custody by a policeman, or kicked down -stabs by the foot- 
man at the end of the farce. " Captain " grew to be a bye- 
word and reproach. A bilker of taverns and victimiser of 
lodging-houses was a captain. The penny-a-liners revelled in 
him, and headed their reports, The Notorious Captain in 

Trouble ; Captain L Again ; A certain Gallant Captain 

has been Repeating his Infamous Tricks in Hampshire ; and 
the like. The " Captain " rivalled the penny-a-liner's other 
bread-provider — " the gallant, gay, Lothario." 

But, the captains grew so scarce at last that the farce-writers 
dropped them in contempt, and the penny-a-liners devoted 
themselves to Magyar noblemen. Some of the Ravelins went 
back to Spain, to find out coal-mines in the gorges of the 
Pyrenees. Some took commission agencies for Toboso's hams 
and the Duke of Garbanzo's sherries — like Captain Strong, 
whom Pendennis knew. Many went to America, where they 
went filibustering or beaver- trapping, and sometimes came 
back and published their Far Western Travels in three 
volumes, and sometimes fell by the hand of a Mexican hang- 
man, like poor dear Raousset Boulbon. A few had shares in 
patents — machines for spinning flax from cobwebs, and ex- 
tracting crimson dyes from egg-shells. One I knew went to 
California with a venture of lucifer matches, Warren's blacking, 
digestive biscuits, and Somebody's pills; he is doing well. 
Gradually, imperceptibly, the Dalgetty type faded away. You 
no longer saw the captain's name in the provisional committee 
list of a bubble company. He was superseded by Professor 
Ravelin, Paracelsus Ravelin, M.D., Condorcet Ravelin, F.R.S. 
Count Von Swindelheim bilked hotel-keepers instead of the 
notorious Captain L . Dalgetty became a myth. The 



342 THE DALGETTY RACE. 

thousand years of peace seemed to have set in, and Gustavus 
Adolphus was sold to the dogs' -meat man. 

The revolution of 1848, attended as it was by prospects of 
a general European convulsion, stirred up some feeble sparks 
of the old Dalgetty element ; but they were sparse and soon 
died out. Some remnants of the erst noble band of captains 
hurried over from the antipodes to see if there were any hard 
knocks going ; but the Unholy Alliance had the best of it, and 
the Dalgetties sank to sleep again, as Washington Irving 
tells us those ghostly Indian chiefs do in the haunted glens 
about Wolfert's Roost, who start from their slumbers when 
they hear some distant band carousing, echo back the shouts, 
and then fall once more into their trance of centuries, with 
their mouldering bows and arrows by their sides. There was 
nothing for Dugald Dalgetty to do in 'forty-eight. Mercenary 
as he was, he was too real and true and noble for the 
miserable skulking barricade fighting, and bombardment of 
blind alleys, and beleaguering of back parlours, and slaughter- 
ing in cellars. 

Who is*this comes riding on a white -horse, all covered 
with crimson and golden trappings ! Who comes riding so 
proudly and defiantly, has so firm a seat in the saddle, 
makes his charger curvet and prance so gTacefully ! He 
wears an embroidered caftan, his belt is full of silver-mounted 
pistols and arabesqued daggers ; a jewelled yataghan is slung 
to his wrist, Ins head is swathed in a spangled turban, a 
muslin veil floats from it ; glossy is his coal-black beard ; he 
is followed by his cavasses and his pipe-bearer. Who is 
this Beyzade, this son of an effendi, this scourge of the 
giaour ? This is Xessim Bey, decorated with the order of 
the Medjidie, by virtue of an imperial firman, colonel of 
the staff of the army of Anatolia. He may be a pacha soon 
and squeeze the rayahs ; he receives tourists from Frangistan, 
and gives them coffee and chibouks. He is brave and 
merciless. No grass grows where his horse's feet have 
trodden. His jack-boots are terrible. None can look on his 
face, it is so radiant. No odalisques are so beautiful as his 
odalisques. .He will be seraskier and marry the padisha's 
daughter. Did he not make terrible work of the Moscovs 
whenever he met them ? This is Nessim Bey. 



THE DALGETTY RACE. 343 

Yes, but this is also our old acquaintance Captain Dugald 
Dalgetty, otherwise Washington Lafayette Bowie, of New 
York city, in the United States of America. The ardent 
Bowie has wearied of the puny exercitations of frontier 
warfare. He is tired of scalping Indians and making topo- 
graphical surveys ; he wants a wider field for his pugnacious 
j)reclilections, and this is why his Highness the Sultan has 
one more colonel, and the Muscovites one more deadly foe. 
I should advise the Muchir Omar Pacha, however, to use, in 
the next war with the Czar, a little more celerity in his 
movements, and come to blows with the enemy rather more 
frequently, than he was able to do in helping to finish the 
last ; for Nessim Bey must have fire to eat, and heads to 
knock off. Otherwise, there may be found in the Russian 
hosts some day a Lieutenant- General Bowiekoff; who will 
never be tired of slaying Turks ; whose Christian names 
are Washington and Lafayette ; and who also hails from New 
York city, United States. 

Dalgetty' s name is in a fair way to become legion. Do 
you see that general officer, surrounded by a brilliant staff, 
bedizened with stars and embroidery? He commands 
armies; he directs campaigns ; he corresponds with princes ; 
he takes the field against thousands. That general officer's 
name is Dalgettiowski. A few years since he skulked about 
the purlieus of Soho, a wretched, proscribed, almost starving 
refugee. He dined for fourpence at a coffee-shop. He 
seldom washed. He vainly strove to eke out a livelihood by 
teaching mathematics. But a good time did come, hard 
knocks were rife, and Dalgetty triumphant. 

Captain Sparkles, late of the Plungers, who lost his 
commission through that ugly chicken-hazard business with 
young Chawkey ; Lieutenant Pluckbare, who was obliged to 
sell out to pay his debts ; all found asylums and commissions 
in the Dromedary Contingent. Eavelin, who came back from 
California, with a few thousands, but was still fond of fight- 
ing, tried hard for an appointment in the Osmanli Mounted 
Ostriches ; and Captain Strong seriously thought at one time 
of giving up the Toboso's hams and sherry business, and 
accepting the post of quarter-master in the Anglo-Kamschatkan 
Legion. 



344 



THE DALGETTY RACE. 



What a pity that, just as all these honest fighting men 
were so anxious to draw their swords to carve their way to a 
little good fortune, their warlike aspirations should have been 
crushed by Peace ! The world is their oyster, which they with 
sword would open ; and, lo ! the crafty diplomatists came 
and took away the mollusc (for the good of the entire 
world, though), and left the noble race of Dalgetty but the 
shells ! 



MAES A LA MODE. 

I like to turn over the pages of that admirably illustrated 
edition of the Life of Napoleon, in which M. Horace Vernet 
has poured forth all the riches of his facile pencil, his varied 
powers of expression, and his vast erudition in military mat- 
ters. Glancing at the varieties of garb assumed by the 
Emperor at different stages of his career — from the long frock 
coat and embroidered collar of the pale meagre young man 
with flowing locks who commanded the artillery at Toulon, 
and crossed the Bridge of Lodi : to the laurel-crowned Im- 
perator in that strange coronation costume invented for him 
by Talma ; the velvet robe sewn 'with golden bees, the lace 
ruff, the long eagle-tipped sceptre; from the world-known little 
cocked hat, high boots, and gray great coat worn by the 
stern, sad, ruined man who bade his troops adieu at Fontaine- 
bleau, to the straw hat, linen jacket and loose pantaloons 
of Longwood, St. Helena ; glancing at all these, I try to 
conjure up to myself an idea of that ghostly Midnight Review 
which poetry has imagined, and painting and music have 
successively striven to express. If such an impossible sight 
could ever be, how much of awful grandeur, yet how much of 
fantastic eccentricity it would present ! As the ghostly drums 
beat, and the unearthly trumpets sounded, the graves of this 
vast military household — severed so far and wide, by mount, 
and stream, and sea — would give up their dead. From the icy 
barriers of the Alps ; from the plains of Lombardy ; from the 
shadow of the Pyramids, the choked trenches of Acre, and the 
poisoned wells of Jaffa ; from the snows of Eylau, the ensan- 
guined banks of the Danube ; the charred embers of Moscow, 
and the icy waters of the Beresina ; from the sierras and ravines 
of Spain ; from beneath the golden barley at Ligny, and from 
the ashes of the chateau of Hougomont ; they would all come. 
The ardent young volunteers of the Republic in its first stormy 



346 MARS A LA MODE. 

days ; the Requisitionaries, the peasant soldiers who, without 
bread, without shoes, almost without arms, crossed the Alps 
to find shoes and bread (and some of them death, and some 
of them thrones, and some of them marshals' batons) on the 
other side ; the revolutionary generals with high plumed hats, 
long coats, tricoloured sashes, and topboots ; the glittering 
barbaric-ally clothed Mamelukes ; the fleet-mounted Guides ; 
the cumbrous artillery ; the brilliant hussars, all furs and 
embroidery, led by the famous sabreur with the snow-white 
plume ; the Old Guard with their high caps, long grizzled 
moustaches, and clean white gaiters ; the beardless conscript ; 
the grenadier of the isle of Elba ; the red Polish lancer ; the 
steel-clad helmetted cuirassier of Waterloo, breaking" his 
valorous heart and strength against the English squares : 
these would all be there. From three quarters of the earth 
Tvould these grisly warriors arrive ; the bones assembling, 
the muscles reclothing, the tattered uniforms enveloping ; 
epaulettes shining through shrouds ; coffin -plates glistening 
into gorgets ; the mouldering dust and ashes gathering into 
a might}' army, as in the days of old in the valley which was 
full of dry bones. The smoke of the battle would be seen ; 
its roar would be heard above the vapours of the tomb : the 
countersign once more Waterloo, and the watchword St. 
Helena ! 

I can't help it. I do my best to be serious; but through 
the very centre of this ghastly spectacle of the imagination 
there will persist in piercing, a fantastic, ludicrous mind- 
picture of a conclave of commanders-in-chief, members of 
clothing boards, military tailors, and army- accoutrement 
makers, sitting in perturbed and anxious deliberation in re 
vestiarid, — as to how the British soldier is henceforth to be 
clad. I have somewhere read of a French savant who was 
present at a dinner table where a violently ponderous theo- 
logical discussion formed the conversation. Questions of 
doctrine, of discipline, of polity, were elaborately argued. 
Everybody had his theological praxis to state and to maintain ; 
all hammered the table, and raised their voices to the loudest 
pitch, save one grave, pale-faced gentleman, who, clad in 
solemn black, with a white neckcloth, ate and drank prodigi- 
ously, but said never a word. The savant at last grew some- 



MAES A LA MODE. 347 

what nettled at the grave man's taciturnity, and charged him 
with a theological poser of the abstrusest description. It 
behoved the man in black to say or do something. Where- 
upon, with the severest gravity he drew towards him a silver 
candlestick, drew from it the wax candle, threw it up over his 
head, so as to, describe a double summersault, which it did so 
accurately as to return into the candlestick ; then, while his 
audience were still staring with amazement, the silent man 
rose, drew back his chair a few paces, leaped high into the 
air, turned head over heels, and fell into his seat on the chair 
without moving a muscle of his face. The man in black was 
indeed no other than Debureau, the renowned mountebank of 
the Funambules, and I need not say that he spoilt the learned 
theological discussion for that evening. 

In like manner my vagabond thoughts have been turning 
head over heels in the Merry Andrew fashion, — and the awful 
solemnity of Napoleon reviewing his spectral braves, gives 
place to vulgar notions of sealed patterns, regulation coatees, 
felt helmets, shell jackets versus tunics, the virtues and vices 
of gold and worsted lace, the weight of knapsacks, the circular 
or conical form of bullets, the abominations of stocks and 
shoulder belts, the cloth yard, the sleeve board, and the tailor's 
goose. Mars in his aspects of fire, famine, and slaughter, is 
entirely superseded by Mars a la mode. 

The only midnight review I can picture to myself, in my 
present frame of mind, is a phantasm, which, when one of 
those clothing-board members or army tailors lays his head 
on his bolster at night, might rise before him after the vexed 
discussions of the day. All the absurdities and variations of 
centuries of military fashion might troop past his bed to the 
rough music of thimbles and shears. The Roman legionary 
with his casque and buckler, his spear and lambroquins ; the 
sergeant of Queen Boadicea's body-guard, with his knotted 
club, and mantle of skins, the rest of his body naked, and 
stained with woad, dark blue, in a neat but not gaudy 
manner ; the kernes and gallowglasses of General Macbeth ; 
the shock-headed woollen-clad Saxons ; the half-naked, golden 
collar and bracelet bedizened hordes of Canute the Dane ; the 
trim-shaven Normans, with registered shirts of mail ; men at 
arms with morions, battle-axes, curtal-axes, maces, arbalests, 



348 MARS A LA MODE. 

pikemen, javelin men ; archers in Kendal green, with, their 
cloth-yard shafts; Elizabethan arquebusiers, with tin-pot 
helmets, and small-clothes stuffed out to a preternatural size ; 
Cromwellian troopers with buff coats, bandoliers, and Bibles ; 
Life Guards, in slouched hats and feathers, periwigs, laced 
cravats, and boots like buckets; also in shovel hats, three- 
cornered hats, cocked hats, " coach- wheel " hats, cocked hats 
again, muff caps, helmets with tops like mutton chops, German 
silver helmets with white, red, and black plumes ; in jack 
boots, gaiters, Wellington boots, and jack boots again; in 
Ramilies wigs, bob-wigs, pigtails, powder, and their natural 
hair. The infantry of the line with caps of every imaginable 
form : like porringers, like candle boxes, like beer-warmers, 
like Chinese pagodas, like pint-pots, like flower-pots : with 
epaulettes, successively like ornamental bell-pulls, like frogs 
turned pale and in convulsions, like swollen sausages, like 
mops without the handles, like balls of Berlin wool without 
the crochet needle, like muffins fringed round their circum- 
ference : in coats single-breasted, double-breasted, pigeon- 
breasted ; with waistbands, now just below the armpits, now 
just above the knees ; with long tails, short tails, tails turned 
back, tails turned forward, and no tails. In pipeclayed smalls, 
and successively in short, long, tight and loose trousers : in 
half gaiters, in short gaiters, and in long gaiters, with fifty or 
sixty buttons to button and unbutton per diem : in half boots, 
whole boots, and ankle-jacks ; in buckled shoes, clasped shoes 
and laced shoes. In all manners of belts, straps, stocks, tags, 
loops, tassels, fringes, furbelows, stars, stripes, flourishes 
scrolls, peaks, laps, facings, edgings, snippings, and crimpings; 
now with " a sleeve like a demi-cannon," here up and down, 
carved like an apple-tart there ; slish and slash, like to a 
censer in a barber's shop. What would all Napoleon's 
reviews be to that British parade of the ghosts of bygone 
fashions ; of spectral pipeclay, of hair powder deceased, of 
heelball tottering, of crossbelts moribund, of stocks dead ? 
A sort of galop infernal of past and present helmets, shakos, 
coatees, knapsacks, belts, boots, and epaulettes, would seem to 
pass before the dazzled eyes of the arbiter of military cos- 
tume. I do not myself wonder much at the indecision which 
has prevailed, and at the delay which has arisen in the choice 



: 



MARS A LA MODE. 349 

of a new costume for the army. Mars has been a la mode in 
so many different shapes ; he has been so frequently nipped 
and snipped, patched, sewn-up, and taken to pieces again, 
that it does not cost the imagination much to figure him 
standing now and then, like the old caricature of the contem- 
plating Englishman, naked with a pair of shears beside him, 
in dire uncertainty as to what dress he shall wear next. 

Among the many themes for wonderment and meditation 
which a sight of the great Duke of Wellington used, in his 
' lifetime, always to afford me, was the thought of the immense 
| variety of uniforms the brave old man must have worn during 
' his lifetime. For the Duke, be it remembered, was always in 
the fashion, and, within a week of his death, was perhaps the 
best-dressed gentleman in England. Yet in his first ensigncy 
he must have worn hair-powder and a pigtail, a cocked hat 
as large as a beadle's, silver bell-pull epaulettes, tights like a 
rope-dancer, and ankle-jacks not unlike those of a dustman. 
The Duke of Wellington in a pigtail and ankle-jacks ! Can 
you reconcile that regulation costume of the subaltern in the 
Thirty-third Foot with the hessian boots and roll-collar of 
Talavera : the gray frock, glazed hat, white neckcloth and 
boots named after himself, of Waterloo : the rich field-mar- 
shal's uniform, covered with orders, of the snowy-headed old 
patriarch who smiles upon the baby Prince, in Winterhalter's 
picture. Or, to offer a stronger contrast, what can be more 
antagonistic to the pigtail and the ankle-jack, than the gor- 
geously-attired old hero, his peer's robes above his glittering 
uniform, carrying the sword of state before the Queen of 
England at her coronation ? 

There has been of late days a general outcry against, and a 
vehement demand for, the radical reform of the costume of 
the British army.* Common sense at home has cried out 
against some of its most manifest absurdities, and experience 
has inveighed against it from the tented field. The agitation 
for the remodelling of Mars has been much more vehement 
among the civilians than among the followers of the warlike 
god himself. Captain Nolan modestly hints in his book at 

* This paper first appeared in 1854, since when several changes have been 
made in the costume and equipment of the British army. 



350 MAES A LA MODE. 

the superiority of wooden over steel scabbards for cavalry. 
Some military authorities have gently presumed to doubt the 
benefits arising from hussars having an extra jacket into whose 
sleeves they never put their arms ; of their wearing caps like 
ladies' muffs, with red silk bags hanging from the side, and 
shaving brushes atop ; and have suggested a sensible alteration 
here, a strap the less there. Without fuss or parade, they 
quietly object to gold-lace. But your great civil authorities 
will have no half measures. " Reform it altogether!" they 
shout wildly. Xo more stocks, no more white ducks, no more 
epaulettes, no more shaving, no more button-brushes, no more 
cherry-coloured pantaloons, no more bear-skin caps, knapsacks, 
pipeclay, belts, facings, lace, or embroidery. They write fifty 
thousand letters to The Times, in which the absurdities of mili- 
tary dress are dwelt upon with savage irony and excruciating 
humour. The dress, and accoutrements, and discipline of the 
troops of his Majesty the King of Candy, his Majesty the 
Emperor of the Patagonians, and her Majesty the Queen 
of the Amazons, are vaunted to the skies ; to the deep 
disparagement of our own miserable, worthless, absurdly 
clad, troops, who can't breathe, work, stoop, walk, run, 
stand, or fight. The Candian chasseurs owe their superla- 
tively greater skill in hitting a mark to their unimprisoned 
arms and wide trousers ; the Patagonian sappers and miners 
survey, plan, dig, sap, and mine in an infinitely superior 
manner because of their comfortable boots ; even the Amazonian 
bashi-bazouks — dressed in a reasonable manner ; and not 
in the infamous, atrocious, absurd, hideous, stifling, choking, 
murderous way that ours are — do greater execution in the 
field. 

Xow, this is all very well up to a certain point. That a 
great deal needed to be mended, in the equipment of our fight- 
ing men, and that a great deal must still be mended, no 
reasonable person can doubt. Comfort, expediency, safety, 
and economy, demand many changes in the uniform of cavalry, 
infantry, and artillery — of the general camp, pioneers and all. 
I shall be glad to see these changes made speedily ; though 
not without deliberation. If they are not found to be advan- 
tageous, try b?,ck and begin over again. Remember Bruce 
and the spider. Only last Saturday, at the little club where I 



MAES A LA MODE. 351 

enjoy my harmony, pending the arrival of my election at the 
Carlton, I heard a gentleman attempt Norah the Pride of Kil- 
dare no less than seven times. He broke down regularly, and 
always at the same place, but was not the least disconcerted at 
being requested to "try back," and at last accomplished the 
ditty to the entire satisfaction of the room. In military tailor- 
ing, as well as in singing, the illustrious performers may try 
back with great advantage. 

In this great " Reform your (military) tailors' bills," how- 
ever, I cannot go so far as the fifty thousand letter writers in The 
Times. I will not pin my faith upon Justitia, who shrieks for 
shooting jackets ; I will not swear by Veritas, who screams for 
short blouses with leather belts, and plenty of pockets in front ; 
I will not adhere to the excited letter writers who vehemently 
demand the immediate abolition of all epaulettes, plumes, and 
embroidery as abominable. In this somewhat (to my mind) 
fierce and sweeping denunciation of military smartness and 
finery, I trace the presence of that indefatigable sect of reli- 
gionists who swear by bristles, snouts, grunts, and curly-tails. 

There are many absurdities, many inconveniences, many 
ridiculous dandyisms, in the costume of the army. Granted. 
Frock coats protect the thighs better than coatees ; epaulettes 
are useless lumps of bullion ; helmets are preferable to shakos ; 
buttons and lace are so much metal and lace thrown away. 
Granted, granted, granted. Therefore dispense with the 
slightest attempt at ornament, and stop short of a button 
beyond the number absolutely necessary. No, I cannot quite 
come to that. I cannot in anything whatsoever yield myself 
up, bound hand and foot, to the uglifiers — men who have an 
innate, though I am willing to believe an unconscious, hatred 
of everything in which there is the slightest trace of beauty, 
symmetry, or fancy. I tremble for the day when the British 
grenadier, attired by whole-hoggery in the severest style of 
utilitarianism, would be nothing but a slovenly, slouching, 
tasteless, hideous guy. I don't want him to be a guy. I 
want him to be sensibly, comfortably, and usefully dressed ; 
but I would leave him a little pride in himself, if he be, as 
Captain Bobadil says, so generously minded ; and I doubt if 
he or anybody else would be much the worse for it. 



COUNTY GUY. 



Sir Walter Scott lias a refrain to one of his charming 
ballads, in the form of an interrogation. The guests are met ; 
the bride is ready (as far as I can recollect), but the bride- 
groom is missing ; and the poet plaintively asks : 

" Where is county Gruy ? " 

I shall be glad to inform the literary executors and assigns of 
the Wizard of the North of the whereabouts of the Guy so 
anxiously inquired after. It needs not an advertisement in 
the second column of The Times to move him to return to 
his allegiance. County Guy is to be found, in great variety 
of form, and in most nourishing condition, in the County 
Militia. 

Now, I do not object abstractedly to Guys in their proper 
place. If bigotry and intolerance never found a more dan- 
gerous outlet for their cruel passions, than the forlorn 
straw-stuffed old scare-crow, with steeple hat, pipe in mouth, 
outward turned fingers, and inward turned toes, that with 
dark lantern and matches, and doggrel rhymes, is paraded 
about London, every 5th of November, we should hear far 
less about Maynooth and Peter Dens, Orange processions 
and the Scarlet Woman. I don't mind a Guy stuck on a 
pole, in a field, to frighten the crows away. I can bear 
with that Guy of Guys, the serjeant-at-arms, when, with a 
gilt poker over his shoulder, he precedes Black Rod to the 
table of the House, with a message from the Lords. He 
is, there, the right Guy in the right place. Guildhall, 
too, is properly graced by the two Guy Giants, Gog and 
Magog. So is a pantomime by the Guys in huge masks. 
But I must and do solemnly protest against the introduction 






COUNTY GUY. 353 

of the Guy element into the British Army. I think it foul 
scorn that the brave men who are ready to spill their blood 
for us like water, as their brethren in the line have already 
done, and to carry the glory of the meteor flag of England to 
the ends of the earth, should be swathed — for they are not 
dressed — in habiliments needlessly and offensively ugly and 
ridiculous. 

In tjie preceding paper — " Mars a la Mode," written more 
than a year ago, I essayed to point out the errors into which 
we were then in danger of running. Cheerfully admitting 
the necessity for an immediate and radical reform of the dress 
and accoutrements of the army; recognising in all their 
indefensibility the abominations of the stock, the coatee, the 
tight shoulder straps, the heavy shakos, the unwieldy brown 
bess ; I yet foresaw how our glorious routiners would run 
— straight as a bull at a gate — into the opposite extreme ; 
how, while reforming, they would destroy ; how, while sim- 
plifying, they would uglify. Behold the result. Routine, 
clothing boards, sealed patterns, army tailors, have done their 
work. The tailor's goose has cackled, and we have an army 
of Guys. 

Let any man walk the streets of any county town, or of the 
suburbs of the metropolis, and look at the Militia. The eye 
hath not seen, the ear hath not heard of, such Guys. They 
can't help being raw lads, loutish in aspect and awkward in 
gait. Time and the drill sergeant will set all that right. I 
grant the tunic in which the militiaman is dressed, properly 
fashioned and proportioned, is a sensible, serviceable garment : 
but, shades of good taste, symmetry and common-sense ! is 
there any necessity for the unhappy County Guy to wear a 
hideous blanket-rag which is in shape neither a tunic, a frock, 
a blouse, a smock, a jacket, a jerkin, nor a vest, but which 
vacillates imbecilely between all these stools, and must fall to 
the ground at last, as a preposterous absurdity ? Is there 
anything in the articles of war that renders it imperative 
for this miscalled tunic to be dyed a dingy brickdust colour 
— like a bad wine stain or an old iron-mould — and for the 
monstrosity to be finished off with facings that give the 
wretched militiaman the appearance of having a sore throat. 
Where is Mr. D. R. Hay and his theory of the harmony of 



354 COUNTY GUY. 

colours ? Where is the School of Design ? Where are the 
commissioners of nuisances? Is there any passage in the 
Queen's Regulations that points out as necessary to the good 
discipline of the army that the militiaman's tunic shall not fit 
him, and that, in accordance with the approved Treasury 
Bench system of the square men being put into the round holes, 
the tall men should be put into the short men's coats, and 
vice versa ? Why, because military costume is so reformed, 
should the miserable militiaman be thrust into shrunken 
trousers, baggy at the knees, and too short in the calf ? Why 
should his head be extinguished by an unsuccessful modifica- 
tion of the Albert hat ? 

Why should he be made ten thousand times more forlorn 
and ludicrous in appearance than Bombastes' army, than any 
of Falstaff's ragged regiment; than any of the awkward 
squad ? 

It would be quite bad enough if things ended here ; but 
County Guy, brave fellow, is ready to volunteer into the line, 
the cavalry, or the guards, so the costume of the line, the 
cavalry, and the guards, has been expressly Guyified to suit 
him. I have seen stalwart sergeants in line regiments — erst 
trim soldierly men — wandering furtively about the recruiting 
districts in the purlieus of Westminster, in the new costume, 
and manifestly ashamed. When Louis Napoleon came over 
here with his Empress on a visit to our gracious Queen, in 
1855, I saw, in his escort to the City, some cavalry officers 
dressed in a new costume, in appearance somewhere between 
that of foreign couriers, horse-riders at Franconi's, and Lord 
Mayor's postilions. And on the following Sunday, crossing 
Trafalgar Square, I saw the Foot Guards marching home to 
their barracks on their way from church. I declare that their 
appearance gave me the horrors for the rest of the day. Their 
" togs" (no word out of the domain of slang will at all con- 
vey an idea of their ugliness), ill-made, ill-fitting; their 
bearskins, so boastfully cut down awhile since, manifestly 
more cumbrous and unshapely than before. There was one 
juvenile officer who slunk along, his head — poor little boy — 
aching and fevered, perhaps, by last night's Haymarket frolics 
— quite buried and weighed down by his enormous muff-cap. 
When the regiment, on an omnibus passing, broke into a 



COUNTY GUY. 355 

quick, running step, to see this little officer trotting across the 
square, his small legs kicking up the dust, his puny sword 
nickering in his hand, and the skirts flip -napping in the 
summer breeze, was a sight to make the friends of bad taste 
laugh. 



a a 2 



SHOPS. 

I pity the man who cannot be astonished. Yet there are 
many such men — people of so non mirabolant a nature, so 
cold-blooded, so fishy in temperament, that they marvel at, 
are perplexed, or are bewildered by nothing. If the ghost of 
their grandmother were to rise before them, they would 
request the apparition to shut the door and be seated. If the 
sky were to rain potatoes, they would simply thank Heaven 
for its bounties, and perhaps give themselves the trouble to 
entreat that, next time it rained, it would rain upwards in- 
stead of downwards. As Murat said (or is said to have said) 
of Talleyrand — you might kick them in the back for hours 
without the slightest change of countenance passing over them. 
An earthquake in Regent Street, a maelstrom in Chelsea 
Reach, a sirocco in Pall Mall, the sea-serpent in the Fleet 
Ditch, an alligator in Fetter Lane, snow in July, and sun- 
strokes in January — all these marvels would draw from them 
no observation more denoting agitation than a languid "Dear 
me! " or a feeble "How curious!" If the earth were to 
stand still, and the sun to turn green, they would, with a 
minute's reference to their almanacks, take the phenomena 
for granted. With them the world is a ball on which they 
live, and what there may be inside it, or underneath it, or 
above it, is no concern of theirs. In society they are known 
as "people who mind their own business;" and being a 
rather numerous class, and comprising within their ranks 
many peers, landed proprietors, bankers, and merchants, are 
highly esteemed and respected for their want of curiosity and 
their discreet immobility. They make money ; and as for the 
poor people who can be and are astonished, and whose 
astonishiflcation leading them from inquiry to discovery, and 
thence to the invention of machines, to the elucidation of 
scientific truths, and to the perfection of the arts which adora 



SHOPS. 35 7 

and humanise society — they live up steep flights of stairs, and 
don't dine every day. 

As for me, I cannot walk a hundred paces into the street 
without seeing something to be wonder-stricken and amazed 
at. I am astonished at the ways of men, women, and children, 
and at the astonishing clothes they wear ; at the ways of dogs, 
errant and stationary ; at the ways of the noise, the dust, the 
rain, the heat ; the frantic turmoil and straining moneywards 
and pleasurewards ; the rags and the velvet ; the gold and the 
dirt ; the jewels and the sores ; the rattling of patent-axled 
wheels and the paddling of bare feet. Are not these enough 
to fill me with amazement — to cause me to be bewildered, 
perplexed ? I wonder at the day, at the light, at the bridge, 
at the river ; the houses standing so bravely upright, and so 
seldom tumbling down ; the countless vehicles, so seldom 
running foul of one another; the countless pedestrians, so 
seldom run over. I wonder at Myself — why and what, and 
who and how I am, and why my feet love more to press City 
stones than verdant fields ; at other people — who they are, 
what they are, where they are going to, and why they are all 
in such a hurry ; until, astonished and wonder-filled at every- 
thing, I become somewhat dazed ; and, turning into a shop to 
collect and to rest myself a little, begin to be astonished 
harder than ever at Shops. 

To the serene orders of mankind a shop is a shop — a room, 
tenement, messuage, or holding, containing, on the shelves 
and counters and in the windows thereof, certain goods and 
merchandises ; which, for a specified money-consideration 
called a price, you may carry away, or cause to be conveyed 
to your own messuage or tenement. The proprietor of the 
Shop is a shopkeeper, and his assistant is a shopman ; and 
the youth who carries your parcel home is a shopboy ; and 
you have been shopping — and that is all. Your Serenity 
sees nothing to be surprised at in a Shop. Why should your 
Serenity ? Your Serenity takes Shops — as it takes life, love, 
children, riches, place and power — as certain things proper to 
Be, and therefore Being ; for you created and by you enjoyed. 
What can it matter to your Serene Opulence where the worm 
came from whose cocoon your purple robe was woven — or 
whence the slaves came who spun your fine linen ? AVhat 



358" shops. 

has your Unmoved Complacency to do with the goldsmiths 
who welded your chain of office — or the artificers who cut, 
and set, and fashioned your signet-ring ? Why should your 
Composed Urbanity — your Immobile Gentility, that wonders- 
at nothing, not even at kings, or coronations, or funerals, 
condescend to wonder at shops ? Low, vulgar places with 
iron-stanchioned shutters, kept by varlets in aprons; with 
tills, and scales, and day-books in which they register their 
gross transactions. 

Napoleon called us a nation of shopkeepers. Right or 
wrong (wrongly, I think, for the shopkeeping element cannot 
be stronger than in France, where, besides, it never goes 
be3 r ond shopkeeping ; while ours carries us on to mercantile 
operations on a gigantic scale), the appellation has stuck to 
us. Still, with all our devotion to shopkeeping, we are apt 
to feel a little sore, and a little humiliation, at our connection 
therewith, and strive to sink the Shop at every convenient 
opportunity. Few terms in the English language are taken 
in so contumelious and insulting a sense as shopboy, shop- 
walker, or counter-jumper : the press and the caricature-sheets 
teem with poignant satires on such degraded beings, who 
become lord mayors, aldermen, merchant princes not unfre- 
quently. Those of us who do keep shops are prone to conceal 
our servile avocation under some pseudo-classical cognomen. 
We call our shops warehouses, emporiums, repositories, stores, 
pantechnicons, establishments, magasins, anything but what 
they really are — Shops. Our shopkeepers are merchant 
tailors, chemisiers, artists in hair, purveyors, costumiers, 
corsetiers — anything but tailors, shirt-makers, hair-workers, 
grocers, or stay-makers. Why is this ? Why, as we have 
hinted in a previous page, should it be considered mean and 
paltry to make a gentleman's coat, and something high and 
genteel to manufacture the cloth the coat is made from. The 
Leeds clothier is a gentleman, a county magistrate perchance, 
and a master of hounds ; the Pall Mall tailor is a snip, the 
ninth part of a man, a beast with a bill. Sir Muscovado Cane 
(of the firm of Cane, Lump, and M 'Trash, of London and 
Cutchcumapoor) is senior partner in a great East India house, 
dealing in rice, sugar, pepper, and spices. Thomas Sandy- 
grits, proprietor of the original golden teapot, in High Street, 



shops. 359 

Shoreditch, deals also in sugar, pepper, and spices ; yet what 
an almost immeasurable distance there is between the two 
shopkeepers : — the one whose shop has a plate-glass frontage 
and a mahogany counter, and the one whose goods are stored 
in a musty, rat-infected warehouse up goodness knows how 
many flights of stairs, with great cranes like gibbets outside 
the windows. Sir Muscovado is a director of the Bank of 
England, and at his country residence at Putney he rears the 
finest hothouse grapes in this realm. He goes to court in a 
golden coach and a golden coat ; he dines with Cabinet 
Ministers. Sandygrits is simply an elder of Little Rabshekah 
Chapel, hard by, smokes his pipe nightly in the parlour of 
the Hog and Tongs public-house, and has serious thoughts of 
marrying his daughter Jemima to young Joseph Sweetbread, 
the butcher of Kingsland. Can you, without being astonished, 
view the enormous social gulf that yawns between these two 
men, brothers in calling, aspirations, and sympathies — for 
both yearn but for one great object : to buy their sugars and 
rice in the cheapest market, and sell them in the dearest? 
Yet do you imagine that the head of the great Cutchcumapoor 
firm would ever take, in public or in private, the slightest 
notice of the grocer — that Lady Cane would sit in the same 
apartment, eat at the same board, as Mrs. Sandygrits? Why? 
Is it more honourable to sell a hogshead of sugar than a 
pound — a bale of cloth than an ell ? Why is there such an 
enormous social disparity between Mr. Sheriff Slow who con- 
tracts to supply the Horse Guards with jackboots, and Mr. 
Crispin Snob who mends my bluchers ? Who made all these 
rounds of the social ladder ? 

Of the infinite variety of shops which afford scope for 
criticism as to their internal economy and exercise for the 
faculty of astonishification, I now propose to select a few; 
and among these I shall be careful to select those in which I 
can exemplify the influence which this age of progress has 
made or failed to make in shops as well as men. 

Take the Everjihing Shop. It was situated three or four 
miles from London, on the high road. The one I take for a 
type, and with which my earliest recollections are entwined, 
was situated somewhere on the road to Edgware — not more 
than a mile and a half, I believe, west of that ghastly range 



360 shops. 

of villas where years ago the mutilated trunk of Greenacre's 
victim was discovered, sewn up in a sack. Jerry Nutts kept 
this shop. He was a weird old man, horrible in aspect, and, 
to my young mind, shared with the goblin potman at the 
Black Lion opposite all the attributes of " Bogey." Jerry 
Nutts's face was, I remember, of an unwholesome pasty hue, 
like a half-congealed suet-pudding. The anatomy of his face 
seemed all wrong, for where you expected bones, there were 
deep hollows in his countenance, and where you looked for 
fresh, osseous protuberances. He had inflamed pink lines for 
eyelids. He had a dreadful old semi-bald head, where the 
sutures of the skull were minutely defined in inlaid dirt, and 
at either lateral extremity of which a flabby ear kept watch 
and ward like a scarecrow to frighten the hairs away. A rimy 
stubble upon his lips and chin ; two purple marks on his 
cheeks, as if all the blood he had had in his cheeks had 
gathered there and stagnated ; a filmy eye ; an indescribable 
leer of malice and ill-temper ; and teeth yellow, crooked, and 
wide apart, gave this old man such a vicious, unsightly aspect, 
that he was the terror of all the children who were his 
customers. I never heard of anything unfavourable to Jerry, 
however. Beyond his general forbidding demeanour, he was 
reported to be a hard man : that is, he never gave any credit, 
and usually refused to subscribe to any incidental charity or 
testimonial ; but he paid his way, and sold good articles, and 
was, take him all in all, a quiet civil neighbour. So Jerry 
prospered. 

Jerry sold everything, almost. Linendrapery, hosiery, 
stationery, confectionery, grocery, toys, books, hats, caps, and 
bonnets. If we were good, Jerry sold the marbles, tops, and 
story-books with which we were rewarded. If we were 
naughty, from Jerry's shop came rods and canes wherewith to 
chastise us. Were we in good health and in rejoicing mood, 
Jerry had low-priced fireworks, or bandits, and Red Rovers, 
and portraits of the champion at the Coronation for tinselling, 
or of the Seven Champions, bound in marble paper covers, for 
us to con and glory over. Were we ill, and peeking, Jerry 
had store of villainous pills and draughts, and powders more 
villainous still (which were taken in sweetmeats, confound 
them! and have made us loathe jam and marmalade ever 



shops. 361 

since) ; and worse and more abominable and abominated than 
all and any, sold Jerry the much-detested oil of the accursed 
castor — that nauseous amalgam of oleaginous globules floating 
on the top of a cup of coffee, or in a wineglass, to horrify and 
awe helpless little children. 

When I knew Jerry first, these were the wares he sold. 
His Everything Shop was by no means an extensive repository, 
being, indeed, a little nook of a place, wedged in between the 
baker's and the butcher's shops. It had not been painted, 
glazed, decorated, or cleaned within the memory of man, and 
its window-panes were of some curiously dingy bottle-glass, 
with bulls' -eyes in the centre. On the cornice frieze above 
the frontage, Jerry had formerly designed to have his name 
painted in full: but the artist had stopped short at 
" Jeremiah Nu " — and had never got any further. There 
was, indeed, no need for Jerry's Christian or surname to be 
painted above his store. He was as well known as the 
butcher's trotting pony, the baker's bandy-legged terrier, or 
the potman at the Black Lion ; and if any of our servants, or 
children, or adults, went, or were sent to fetch anything from 
Nutts's, they would find Nutts's without the name being 
painted above the lintel in Roman capitals, I' 11 warrant you. 
The excise requirements touching the license to sell tea, 
tobacco, snuff, and pepper — all of which Jerry sold — were 
satisfied by a little mortuary-looking inscription, which few 
could read, and nobody did read, on one of the door-jambs ; 
and this, saving some disparaging epigrams in chalk upon 
Jerry himself, due to some juvenile Juvenals of the neigh- 
bourhood, formed all the writing displayed upon the doors, 
walls, or shutters of the Everything Shop. One of my 
earliest and chiefest marvels at Jerry and his establishment 
was that he never seemed to be " out" of anything. If you 
asked for some recondite article, such as a pair of scalpels, or 
an ounce of tincture of Benzoin, Jerry would produce the one 
or the other with as much alacrity as though you had ordered 
a halfpenny ball of twine, or a hank of tape. His merchan- 
dises, also, though arranged in seemingly the most hetero- 
geneous and helter-skelter marner, seemed all marvellously 
susceptible of being found when they were wanted, and put 
away when they were done with. At first sight, you would 



362 shops. 

take his shelves to be a confused mass of red herrings, 
variegated ribbons, story-books, glazed calico, arrow-root, 
Everton toffee, drugs, children's socks, sugar-candy, beaver 
hats, butter and cheese, tracts, York hams, Irish poplins, 
band-boxes, fiddle-strings, japanned tea-trays, raspberry jam, 
and pickled anchovies, all thrown together without order, 
arrangement, or regularity. There was a place for everything, 
and everything had its place in Jerry's shop ; and though, 
from the intensely amalgamated nature of the stock, there was 
certainly a somewhat saccharine flavour about the salt, a 
cheesy twang in the sugar, a slightly snuffy odour about the 
butter, and a sort of olla podrida perfume about the woven 
and textile fabrics, everything was as neatly stowed and 
arranged in Jerry's shop as in the store-room of a man-of- 
war, or the pledge department of the Mont de Piete in Paris. 
Jerry had no wife alive. " His missus," he condescended 
to say, when he was conversational, which was not often, 
" died a many years since;" and he was wont afterwards to 
jerk his thumb towards a painted abomination in oils in an 
ebony frame, wherein a woman, with a face like a sheep, and 
a hat and feathers like a negress, was grinning like a baboon 
through what appeared to be a hole in a red curtain. Pier 
neck being bare, and encircled by a preposterous necklace, 
and her w T aist about half an inch lower than her armpits, this 
performance was conjectured to be a portrait of the late 
Mrs. Nutts, and the period of its execution somewhat 
proximate to 1802. Nothing more, however, was known of 
the deceased lady, save that she was supposed, at some period 
or other anterior to her demise, to have given birth to Jerry's 
daughter, Julia — a pretty, fair-haired little mite of a thing of 
some eighteen summers, who would have been the belle of 
the village without appeal or opposition, had she not, poor 
soul ! been afflicted with some constitutional weakness of the 
limbs, which constrained her to wear a grisly apparatus of 
irons, and crimson leather, and Heaven knows what belts and 
bars. It was very melancholy to see this poor, helpless, fair- 
haired child sitting inertly in her chair in the little parlour 
behind the shop, so beautiful yet so crippled ; while her old 
father, with his weazened, ill-favoured face and shrunken 
limbs, skipped about as actively as a veteran ape. Jerry was 



shops. 363 

very fond of his daughter, and if she could have eaten gold, 
or all the pickled anchovies and orange marmalade (things by 
which he set as great a store, almost, as money), he would, I 
believe, have given it her to eat. Jerry even went to the 
length of taking sanitary journeys with her, leaving his shop 
to the care of his apprentice. He took her to Brighton, 
to Bath, to the famed waters of Harrogate ; to an infallible 
curer of limb affections, who scrubbed his patients with a 
tooth-brush ; to one who scraped his with an oyster-knife ; to 
another who rubbed his with a horse -hair glove ; and finally 
to one (in high repute just then) who stuck his patients all 
over with diachylon-plaster, and then oiled them with linseed 
oil and beeswax. Finding these hygeian excursions some- 
what to interfere with his business (being indeed, moreover, 
apprehensive of the blunders of his apprentice), Jerry sum- 
moned from the depths of the north country a sister of his 
late wife — also sheep-faced, but reduced to the most dilapi- 
dated state of eweflom, yet attired in a sort of scarecrow 
lamb fashion. To this relative poor Julia was confided, once 
more to resume her travels in search of health; and astounding 
rumours were current at the bar of the Black Lion, and at 
garden-gates among the housemaids, who slipped out to 
purchase a " mossle of ribbing," about nine of the clock at 
night, of Mr. Nutts's unheard-of liberality ; of how he had 
said to his sister-in-law, " Bring her back well, Judy, and 
I'll make a lady of you ;" likewise, and at repeated intervals, 
the much meaning words, " Spare no expense." 

Julia Nutts came back in about nine months or a year, not 
quite strong and well, but without the ghastly irons. Whether 
for this comparative cure the sheep-faced aunt was made a 
lady or not, I am unable to state ; but it is certain that she 
was seen in our neighbourhood no more. Julia never relapsed 
into her helpless state again, but she was always delicate, 
languid, and ailing. She was well enough, however, two 
years afterwards, to be married, as you shall briefly hear. 

I have said that Nutts had an apprentice. He was a varlet 
some seventeen years of age; the greatest lout, the most 
incorrigible sluggard and idler, and the most indomitable 
thickhead, you can conceive. His name . was Martin Duff. 
He had a bullet-head, a snub-nose, beefy pendulous cheeks, 



364 shops. 

pig's eyes, a wide-mouthed waddling frog's mouth, and two 
great red ears, which were continually galled and chafed by 
a pair of gigantic and preternaturally stiffened shirt-collars, 
which he persisted in wearing. His stupidity and dulness 
were beyond human capacity to calculate or comprehend. 
He was not ignorant, he was ignorance itself — ignorance so 
crass that you might almost fancy sowing seed and growing 
mustard and cress in it. He inked his fingers and smeared 
his apron. He wore his shoes down at heel, and could not 
part his hair straight. His amusements were puerile, con- 
sisting in cutting out paper figures, or playing with boys 
ridiculously smaller than himself. He could remember the 
names of no articles, no prices, no customers. He was a 
fool, sir! 

Between this youth, Jerry, and every cane, rope, and 
offensive missile in the house, there had been for years 
a union and understanding of the most intimate nature. But 
Jerry was at last obliged to give in. 04 all the multifarious 
modes of correction he had tried, the experience he had 
gained only amounted to this : that the back part of a 
scrubbing-brush rapped violently on the boy's occiput would 
extract an answer when he was most obstinate ; and that a 
pegtop dug violently into his elbow or shins would cause him 
to utter an ejaculation of pain. Beyond this the seed he had 
sown produced no fruit. The lad went on as usual for a 
couple of years more ; droning, dawdling, scrawling inane 
figures on the slate, mixing sugar-candy with gum-Benjamin, 
and sassafras with floss -silk, till it became noised about one 
Saturday night that young Duff at Nutts's was growing a 
pair of whiskers. With the whiskers, which were of a 
scrubby, irregular kind, came apparently Martin Duff's 
intellect, or his wise teeth. His genius flowered late, but 
flowered at last. He took to wearing tail-coats, and shirt- 
collars larger than ever, and was perpetually studying a 
big book with a calfskin cover — by some averred to be 
AValkinghame's Tutor's Assistant ; by others, Maunder' s 
Treasury of Knowledge. Be it as it may, Martin Duff grew 
bright to the extent of weighing, tying up, and charging 
correctly for half a pound of tea — a thing he had been 
totally incapable of doing before ; and so rapid was the 



shops. 365 

progress of his genius, and consequent advance in the estima- 
tion of society and of his master, that none of us were very 
surprised to hear that the long apprentice was about to be 
married to Julia Nutts. 

Let me see. They were married just before I went to school 
for the first time ; but I remember it as though it were 
yesterday. The ceremony took place in a little church, across 
three fields and a style, in the churchyard of which I have 
heard that Jack Sheppard, the great robber, was buried. 
Miss Nutts looked very p%le and pretty, in slate-coloured silk ; 
and Martin Duff was magnificently hideous in blue and brass 
buttons, and grey kerseymeres, and what not. Jerry Nutts 
for the first and last time in his life was seen in a hat (he 
usually wore a canvass cap with a battered peak), and from 
his continually frictionising his eyes with the sleeve of his 
coat on the road to and from church, it was conjectured that 
he was much affected. But the bride and bridegroom went 
off to some watering-place for the honeymoon ; and I went to 
school, and from thence into the cruel world, and forgot, 
almost, that they or their village had being. 



THE GEEAT INVASION. 



The English Nation have always been distinguished by a 
strong predilection for a "bogey" — a dreadful bugbear, 
hated, feared, talked about by everybody. For a bogey of 
bogeys — a bugbear about whom there can be no mistake, — a 
thorough, right-down sanguinary, man-eating, woman-murder- 
ing, child- roasting, raw-head-and-cross-bones bogey, give me 
Bonaparte. 

In the time of the original " Boney " the cry was very 
strong. The French were continually landing (in imagi- 
nation.) somewhere or other. Not a smuggler attempted a 
peaceable run of brandy on a moonlight night, but the hated 
Corsican — jack-boots, cocked hat and all — was presumed to 
be in full march on the Metropolis ; not a little boy sent up 
his harmless rocket, or discharged his innocuous squib, but 
fearful reports were circulated of a French -kindled conflagra- 
tion, or at best of the simultaneous illumining of the 
beacon fires. Boney, his marshals, and his much redoubted 
invasion, were here, there, and everywhere. 

We had a slight invasion panic in the year ? 40 (when 
Commodore Napier beat the Egyptians with their famous 
instrument of torture — a stick). Our " Boney " then was 
an astute old gentleman, with a pear-shaped head, who, 
assuming the patronymic of Smith, abdicated sovereignty in 
a hack-cab. He was to invade us in the twinkling of a bed- 
post — he, Monsieur Thiers, Marshal Bugeaud, and the 
Chasseurs d'Afrique ; all about some Eastern question, the 
merits of which, if anybody understood or understands, I 
am sure I don't. The year '43 came, and that terrible 
pamphlet by the good-natured Prince Admiral, who so 
kindly stood godfather to our Joinville cravats. He was to 
blow us to pieces with steam-frigates ; to bombard Brighton ; 
to demolish Dover; to lay Lowestoff low; to turn Great 



THE GREAT INVASION. 367 

Grimsby into a Golgotha, and Harwich into a howling 
desert. '45 came ; Pritchard, Tahiti, Queen Pomare, and 
the grim Guizot. War ! war ! war ! cried the bogey-fearers. 
Lamoriciere, Pelissier, Changarnier were to land the day 
after-to-morrow. '48 came, and a few thousand National 
Guards, who, despite the fears of the alarmists, were 
provided with railway return tickets in lieu of mortars and 
howitzers. 

And now the trumpet-cry sounds louder than ever. Now 
that the shores of England and France are united by the 
electric wire, by the iron hand-shaking of railroads, by a 
hundred thousand bonds of friendship and interest besides, 
we are to have a real invasion — a dreadful invasion — an 
invasion in earnest. It is all up with London, England, 
Great - Britain, and the Colonies ! Our soldiers can't fight, 
and our ships can't sail ; our guns won't fire ; nor will our 
bayonets pierce. Tilbury Fort is of no use, and the Guards 
must march out of London at one end as the French enter it 
by the other. We haven't got a decent fortification, or a 
serviceable gun, or an efficient soldier. As for " Veritas," 
" Civilian," " Q, in the Corner," the " Constant Readers," and 
the " Occasional Correspondents," they give up all hope. It 
is all over with us. Let us put sackcloth and ashes on our 
heads. 

But what is the use, my friends, of crying " Wolf! " when 
the foe has already entered our sheepfolds — when he has 
already carried away the most succulent of our young lambs 
from their bleating mothers, and thirsts now, with his raven- 
ing jaws all dripping with gore, for our lives ? 

Shall we be invaded ? 

We are invaded ; root and branch, body and bones, horse 
and foot, neck and heel, outfang and infang. The invasion 
has been going on for years, and we recked nothing of it. 
The insidious enemy, burrowing like a mole underground, 
has sapped our foundations; has undermined our institu- 
tions. An unscrupulous army of mercenaries (principally 
Irish) have carried out his iniquitous behests. We are com- 
passed round about, hemmed in, surrounded by his fortalices — 
not masked batteries or stockaded forts — but defiant, brazen- 
faced strongholds. Great, and getting greater day by day, 



368 THE GREAT INVASION. 

is the invasion of London. We are beleaguered by Brigadier 
Bricks and Field-Marshal Mortar. Their weapons of offence 
have been scaffold-poles and bricklayers' hods ; their munitions 
of defence, hoarding and wheelbarrows. This is what I call 
the "real invasion." 

Take up this map of the Metropolis published last year, 
and glance at that little kernel, coloured scarlet, called the 
City, and then at the prodigious extent of Nutshell surround- 
ing it, all loudly demanding (and meriting) to be included in 
the general title "London." Yet this little scarlet kernel, 
with some scattered streets about Westmonasterian marshes, 
was the whole of London once. It was big enough to give 
laws to all England and to great part of France for hundreds 
of years ; it was big enough to hold a Lombard Street ; which, 
even then, stood in no unfavourable degree of comparison 
with a China orange. It was big enough to have Lord 
Mayors who bearded Kings; to be a constant source of 
anxiety and uneasiness to the Sovereign; to be the philoso- 
pher's stone of Jack Cade's ambition; to be, as it always 
has been, a monarch among cities. But the nutshell? 
How small the kernel looks, with his rubicund boundary ! 
Throw in Westminster and Southwark, as the three appear 
in Hollar's print : how diminutive they are with the big nut- 
shell around ! Take a map of London, hydrographed even 
within the memory of man — within thirty years let us say — 
the nutshell has still the best of it, and the kernel shrinks 
wofully, even amidst its layers upon layers of cuticle. 

The prodigious enlargement of London seems more to me in 
the act of the country closing round the town, than of the town 
advancing on the country — more as a giant hand gradually 
closes up its Titanic fingers on a shrivelled dwarf, than as the 
dwarf, growing into the giant, and throwing up earth-heaps 
in its struggle for emancipation from the parent monster. 
The fat has grown round the heart, and the heart has grown 
torpid and sluggish in the midst. Do you think it is that 
scarlet kernel — once the whole City of London — that has 
pushed out mandibles, crab-like feelers, on every side, and, 
cancer-like, has spread over the green fields and shady lanes ? 
Do you think the kernel is the spider, and Westminster and 
Southwark the web ? It may be so ; but I rather incline to 



THE GREAT INVASION. 369 

the theory that the advancement is towards, ancl not from, the 
kernel. That is why I call it an invasion : and the invasion 
seems to me gradually but surely driving, into a constantly 
diminishing circle, all sorts of old abuses, old nuisances, old 
vested interests, old " time-honoured institutions," towards the 
shrivelled old kernel, which, though she knows (excuse the 
gender) she might be rid of them by the aerial locomotive of 
progress, seeks rather (happily impotently) to cause them to 
permeate through sewers into healthier streams, poisoning 
them meanwhile ; or she would strenuously seek (always impo- 
tently) to cast them, as so much guano, on to the invader's 
fields around her, where they would produce a nice rich crop 
of gingerbread coaches, men in brass, prejudice, dirt, water- 
bailiffs, over-driven bullocks, choked sewers, reeking slaughter- 
houses, and coal and corn committees. What will the nut- 
shell do? Will its invasion, hugging, in boa-constrictor 
fashion, the old, musty, shrivelled, yet wealthy kernel, hug it 
into better shape? or will it crush it and cause it to collapse 
entirely; forcing it, by some hidden phoenix process of its 
own, to reproduction in another guise to entire rejuvenescence? 
It is natural for large cities to grow larger. Pine- apples 
grow ; so do little boys, and lawyers' bills of costs — why not 
capitals ? The little island of St. Louis once held all there 
was of Paris. Vienna has outgrown its glacis; Madrid, 
Naples, Venice, have all grown ; and Constantinople — no ; for 
Constantinople will be to me always a mystery, even as 
Smyrna is. They are always being burnt down, yet never 
seem to get smaller or larger. But London has not grown in 
any natural, reasonable, understandable way. It hasn't grown 
bigger consistently. It hasn't increased by degrees, like the 
pine-apple or the little boy. The lawyer's bill may be a little 
more like it ; for, like that dreadful document, it has swollen 
with frightful, alarming, supernatural rapidity. It has taken 
you unawares ; it has dropped upon you without warning ; it 
has started up without notice; it has grown with stealthy 
rapidity, from a mouse into a mastodon. 

Forty years ago ! — Boney the first, had all but finished 
eating his heart on a rock. Thistlewood and others had been 
decapitated. A grave judicial discussion had not long before 
been closed as to whether a murderer and ravisher had a 



370 THE GEE AT INVASION. 

right to the "appeal by battle." The Old Bailey Monday 
morning performances yet took place before crowded and 
unfashionable audiences. Samuel Hayward had just been 
hanged for burglary, and Fauntleroy was yet to suffer for 
forgery ; women were yet whipped . for larceny ; and George, 
the gentleman of gentlemen, was king. There were no rail- 
roads, and no police, save the red-waistcoated Bow-Street 
runners and the purblind old watchmen. There were no 
coffee-shops, no reading rooms ; and the coffee-houses were 
taverns resorted to (in the paucity of clubs) by the nobility 
and gentry. It was considered aristocratic to beat the watch ; 
it was esteemed "Corinthian" to get drunk in the purlieus of 
Drury-Lane ; it was very "tip-top" to patronize a prize-fighter. 
We have been invaded by manners and customs somewhat 
different since the gentleman of gentlemen was king. 

Concerning the brick- and-mortar invasion : There was no 
Victoria Park, no Belgravia, and no Tyburnia. Tyburn Gate, 
indeed, yet stood where Tyburn Gallows not so many years 
before had stood, and beneath which mouldered the bones of 
Cromwell, Ireton, and Bradshaw. Paddington was, but it was 
countrified ; and the Edgeware Road was simply a rural road 
leading to Edgeware, as formerly Oxford Street was but the 
high-road to Oxford. Portland, Somers, Camden, and Kentish 
Towns were no more integral portions of London, as they now 
are, than is Footscray in Kent, or Patcham in Sussex. The 
New Road was dangerous to walk in at night, and the open 
fields about St. Pancras Church (catch any open fields about 
there now) a favourite rendezvous for body-snatchers and 
barkers to hide their " shots " (so the bodies they had rifled 
from graves, were called). Clerkenwell, it is true, was thickly 
populated ; but Pentonville, about where the Model Prison is 
now (and there was no Model Prison then), was quite rural. 
Islington, as far as concerns the High Street and the neigh- 
bourhood of the "Angel," was suburbanly Londonified, but 
Holloway was still a journey. As to Highgate and Hornsey, 
they were nowhere — terra incognita, almost, or at best as 
difficult of access as Windsor or Reading. Touching the 
irregular cube, bounded at the base by the Whitechapel and 
Mile End Roads, on the east and west by Hackney and by the 
Dalston and Kingsland Roads, and on the north by the 



THE GREAT INVASION. " 371 

London and North- Western branch line (from Camden Town 
to Blackwall) — which irregular cube comprises within its 
limits, Hackney, Globe Town, Bethnal Green, Dalston, Kings- 
land, and the crowded districts known as the Tower Hamlets 
—I have no hesitation in saying, that, swarming with houses 
and inhabitants as it is now, it was in 1822 very little better 
than a waste. Goodman's Fields and the entourage of the 
London Docks had even then their tens of thousands; but where 
the Commercial Road stretches now, through Stepney, Bow, 
and down towards Limehouse, it stretches through strongholds 
of the real invaders of London — the brick-and-mortar warriors, 
who are compassing the city round about. 

In '22, where was Chelsea? Rurally aquatic. Chiswick, 
Hammersmith, Kew ? All plainly and distinguishably sepa- 
rated from London; but where are they now? Millbank was 
far off ; Pimlico was in the country ; no man had yet heard 
of Belgrave Square. Crossing Vauxhall Bridge, what were 
Newington, Kennington, Vauxhall, Lambeth, Walworth, Cam- 
ber well, Brixton, in the year 1822 ? What sort of road was 
the Old Kent Road in those days ? And were not Deptford 
and Greenwich separated from London by miles of green fields? 
Bermondsey and the Borough were always, within my recol- 
lection, integral London ; but how about Rotherhithe ? How 
about Blue Anchor Road, Spa Road, the neighbourhood of the 
Commercial Docks, Millpond Fields, the Saltpetre Works, the 
Halfpenny Hatch, the 

I am out of breath ! Here is the real invasion ! Don't 
tell me that the old London, the grim old kernel, far away 
over the water yonder, has done all this — has simply outgrown 
herself? It is an invasion, I tell you — stalwart provincials 
marching upon a devoted metropolis. Brighton, I know, will 
be bursting into the station at London Bridge very shortly ; 
Greenwich is London already ; so is Brentford ; so are Clap- 
ham, Wandsworth, and Brixton ; so are Kilburn, Cricklewood, 
and Crouch End. I am looking out for the arrival of Liver- 
pool daily ; and I should not be in the least surprised to meet, 
at no very distant period, Manchester, all clad in cotton, 
smoking an enormous chimney, arm-in-arm with Salford, 
marching gravely along the Great North Road, to make a 
juncture with London at Highgate. 



372 THE GREAT INVASION. 

To have a complete and comprehensive view of the progress 
of the invaders and the plight of the invaded ; to form any- 
thing like a just view of the astonishing growth of London 
since the year '22 ; to see it as it is, monstrous, magnificent, 
the largest city in the world, and its capital, you should, pro- 
perly, be a bird : say an eagle, or at least the gentle lark. 
Soaring on high, you should pause a moment on the wing, 
and drink in at a glance the wonders that lie beneath you. 
You can't be a bird, you say. Professors of metempsychosis 
are not so plentiful as those of mesmerism, clairvoyance, or 
the discernment of character from handwriting. Besides, you 
don't believe in the transmigration of souls. Very well ! 
You believe in balloons ? Here is one, just ready to ascend 
from the Royal Gardens no matter where. The " aerostat" is 
inflated ; the last bottle of champagne imbibed ; the amateur 
aeronauts try to look easy and unembarrassed, and fail dis- 
mally in the attempt ; the signal gun is fired ; the aeronaut 
vociferates " Let go ! " A cheer ! Two cheers ! Some ridi- 
culously inappropriate music is played by a brass band. More 
cheers ! fainter and fainter, as the earth, in a most uncalled- 
for and inconsistent manner, appears to sink from beneath 
you. You do rise ; for anon is silence, stillness, in the calm 
air, through which the occasional remarks of your companions 
ring sharp and clear like rifle cracks. There : never mind 
the neck of the balloon ; that is the aeronaut's business, 
not yours. Take a firm grip of the side of the car, and 
look down. Look down with wonder, admiration, grati- 
tude. 

The City is all burnished gold ; for the setting sun of a 
September day has put it into a warm bath — -a " bath of 
beauty," as pantomime poets say. The river is all silver ; save 
what are spangles and diamonds. It winds and twists and 
writhes like a beautiful serpent, as it is magnificently beau- 
tiful without, and foully poisonous (bless the scarlet kernel !) 
within. Those black lines crossing the river are the bridges. 
That fleeting evanescent darkness, tarnishing the gold on the 
houses and the silver on the river, is the shadow of a cloud. 
That transparent blue haze hanging quite over the City, like a 
gauze drapery to the golden houses, cut exactly to the shape 
of the City, thinner and almost ragged where parks, or 






THE GREAT INVASION. 373 

squares, or open places are, is the smoke — the smoke of 
London, hanging over it, shrouding it, blackening its edifices, 
poisoning its inhabitants. 

Keep looking down, and look towards where my finger 
points, that thing, like a golden pine-apple much fore-short- 
ened (the sun is strong upon it) is St. Paul's. Those crowds 
of small black ants toiling through that narrow lane, are 
men, women, and children, in carriages, on horses, on foot ; 
driving, riding, or walking, eastward or westward. The 
Monument is a Christmas Candlestick ; the Tower is a Doll's 
House. There is not a man in London as large as Shem, Ham, 
or Japhet, in the toy Noah's Ark. Where is the roar of 
London, and the rattle of wheels ; the speechifying, the bar- 
gain-driving, the laughing and the weeping ? Faster and 
faster we rise into space. And the silence is more intense, 
and the City below us is no bigger than a man's hand. 

Now, if you had ascended with MM. Garnerin, Blanchard, 
or Pilatre de Rosier ; had you taken a flight with old Mr. 
Sadler, the aeronaut in 1822, when George the Gentleman 
was King, you would be sore astonished now, gazing at London, 
under the auspices of some " gallant and intrepid aeronaut :" 
where all was green before, you would find long lines of 
compact masses of houses. The crowds of black ants would 
have increased an hundred-fold ; the blue, gauzy, ragged smoke 
blanket would have stretched marvellously ; you would have 
appreciated and acknowledged the effects of the Bricklayers' 
Invasion. 

On ascending at night (which, by-the-bye, cautious old Mr. 
Sadler never did), you would be struck with pleasurable 
astonishment at the aspect of London by night, as compared 
with London as it was forty years ago. In the place of 
"darkness visible," you would have an elaborate and exqui- 
sitely beautiful network of gas spangles — a delicate tracery of 
glow-worm lights, of brilliant pinholes, sparkling dots, clearly 
defining the outline of every street, square, and alley of the 
world City ; stretching out less thickly towards where the 
brick invasion had relaxed its vigour, dotting long lines of 
suburban roads, where the metropolitan constabulary drops 
off, and the horse patrol begin to be visible, getting small by 
degrees and beautifully less till they end in the blue blackness 



374 THE GREAT INVASION. 

of the far-off country, twenty or thirty miles away on either 
side of you. 

In no part of London is the invasion of bricks and mortar 
so perceptible as on the line of railway which, commencing at 
Camden Town, runs through Islington, Hackney, Bow, Strat- 
ford, Old Ford, Stepney, and Limehouse to Blackwall. It 
extends nearly half round the Middlesex side of London. It 
is an eccentric railway, for I have measured the distance (on 
the map) from Camden Town to Blackwall, and my friend the 
railway goes miles out of its road to take you to the last-named 
locality ; though, curiously enough, it rattles you thither in 
quicker time than the omnibus would do. I have seen 
irascible old gentlemen clench their umbrellas, muttering 
fiercely that they didn't understand being taken to Hackney 
on their way to Fenchurch Street ; and middle-aged females 
reduced to a piteous state of mental imbecility by Islington 
being near Limehouse ; afterwards piteously demanding which 
was Bow (which they were given to understand was in Cheap- 
side), and inextricably confounding Stratford with the birth- 
place of the Swan of Avon. The last time I patronised this 
cheerful line, there was no glass to the window of the car- 
riage in which I sat. Complaining mildly to four separate 
porters at four separate stations, and pleading rheumatism, I 
received consecutive answers of " Dear me ! " " Oh, ah ! " 
" So it is ! " and " Can't help it ; " which (taking them to 
be somewhat evasive and unsatisfactory in their construction) 
prompted me to give vent to vague threats of memorialising 
the public journals. I should like to become better acquainted 
with that philosopher (he must have been a philosopher) who, 
seeing me irate, administered cold comfort to me by telling 
me that the last time he travelled by the line in question, his 
carriage had no door. " And it was night, sir ! " 

As this iron and not immaculate railroad (it has its good 
points, notwithstanding) pursues its circuitous route, you may — 
if you don't mind looking out of the window, and running all 
the adverse chances of easterly winds and ashes from the engine 
• — see many curious and edifying things. Anon, the train rushes 
through mangy, brown-turfed fields, where the invasion has just 
.begun; where rubbish may be shot; where poles, with placards 
affixed to them, denote the various "lots" which are "To be 



THE GREAT INVASION. 375 

Sold or Let, on Building Leases." Melancholy-looking' cows, 
misanthropic donkeys, pigs convinced of the hollowness of 
the world, wander pensively about these fields, gazing at the 
building-lots, grubbing about the lines of foundation for rows 
of houses which are to be erected ; lamenting, perhaps, in 
their vaccine, asinine, or porcine hearts, the ruthless march 
of bricks and mortar. These semi-suburban animals feed 
strangely. Feeling themselves to be in a state of transition, 
perhaps, like their pasture-grounds, they accommodate them- 
selves to all kinds of food. I think the cows eat quite as 
much broken crockery-ware as grass ; the donkeys eat any- 
thing, from saucepan-lids to pieces of fractured bottles ; and 
there is a pig of my acquaintance — residing in an impromptu 
pigstye in the neighbourhood of Hoxton — which, before my 
eyes, ate a straw-hat of considerable dimensions ; and which, 
being subsequently (by the juvenile and indignant proprietor 
of the hat) lapidated with a decayed flower-pot, ate that too ! 

Bricks and mortar invade market-gardens ; they elbow 
green-houses; they jostle conservatories; they thrust summer- 
houses away. Still looking from the carriage-window, do we 
see streets upon streets growing up in commons, and what 
were once shady lanes ; filling up ditches ; tumbling down 
hedges everywhere ; crushing up the country in its concrete 
grasp. Here and there a solitary pollard willow stands among 
scaffold-poles and wheelbarrows, seeming to wonder very 
much how it got there, and feeling itself, doubtless, an ana- 
chronism. Again, the train rushes over houses — or rather on 
a viaduct parallel with the tops of the houses. The imperti- 
nent locomotive gives " knowing looks " into little, queer, 
poky attics, where gentlemen are giving the last turn to their 
whiskers, and ladies the last tug at the laces of their corsets. 
Curious Asmodeus-like peeps do we get of the internal life of 
these houses. The knowing locomotives wink at the windows, 
and the washing hung out in the back garden ; and, with an 
impertinent whistle and a puff of smoke, rushes on. 

Diverge at Bow, and you can go through Old London to 
Fenchurch Street. Keep on towards Black wall, and the traces 
of New London, in its invading form, meet you at every step. 
Factories, dye-houses, bone- boiling establishments, are sur- 
rounded by houses, where they were (and ought to be) removed 



376 THE GEE AT INVASION. 

from the contiguity of a metropolis. Chapels, devoted to the 
service of all imaginable creeds, start up in these invading 
streets. New Jerusalemites, Mormonites, Johanna South- 
cotonians, Howlers, Jumpers, and Shakers, join the army of 
invaders, and are fiercely pious in Meeting-houses, the roofs 
of which occasionally tumble in, not with age, but for pure 
want of seasoning — so new they are. 

Try to get out of town any way, and the bricks drive you 
back, the mortar hangs on your skirts, and harasses you 
fiercely. I remember the time when London finished at Pad- 
lock House, and when Kensington was* almost in the country. 
Kensington, Hammersmith, * Turnham Green (the " Pack 
Horse"), is a mere onnnbus "public" now! — Brentford — 
Isleworth almost — what are they now ? A line of houses — 
that is all. 

Where is it all to end ? When will the invasion cease ? 
Will the whole island be covered with houses ? Or even as 
the great wheel keeps turning round and round ; even as the 
winter gives place to spring, and so round to winter again and 
again ; even as the new grows old, and then new again ; so, 
perhaps, will the great City grow and grow, and its growth 
yet resolve itself into insignificance — till the great becomes 
small, as small as when the boatman ferried St. Peter over 
the pond to Westminster, or the Danes fought at Holborn 
Bars, or Eleanor's corse rested at the village of Charing. 



Y AD ACE. 



Now yadace is a game. There are required to play it 
neither cards nor dice, cues, balls, chequer-board, counters, 
fish, pawns, castles nor rooks. It can be played in winter 
or in summer, at home or abroad, in perfect silence, 
amidst the greatest hubbub. The race is to the swift in 
yadace\ for the most skilful player must win. You cannot 
cheat at yadace ; and it is a game that a child of nine may 
begin, and may not have finished when he finds himself an 
old man of ninety. 

To give you a proper notion of yadace I must take you to 
Algiers. 

Are you acquainted with that strange town ? the aspect of 
which — half Oriental half Parisian — puts me in mind fan- 
tastically of a fierce Barbary lion that has had his claws pared 
and his teeth drawn, and has been clipped, shaven, and curled 
into a semi-similitude of a French poodle. I never was in 
Algiers, myself. I mean to go there, of course (when I have 
visited Persia, Iceland, Thibet, Venice, the ruined cities of 
Central America, Heligoland, and a few other places I have 
down in my note-book), but my spirit has been there, and 
with its aid, that of my friend Doctor Cieco, who was formerly 
a surgeon in the Foreign Legion out there, and a file of the 
Akbar newspaper, I can form a tolerably correct mind-picture 
of the capital of Algeria. A wonderful journal is the Akbar, 
and a magic mirror of Algiers in itself. Commandants d'etat 
major, chefs d'escadron, and chirurgiens major are mixed up 
with sheikhs, mollahs, dervishes, and softas ; spahis and 
zouaves indigenes. There are reports of trials for murder 
where Moorish women have been slain in deserted gardens, 
by choked up wells, under the shadows of date-trees — slain 
by brothers and cousins El This, Ben That, and Sidi Some- 
body—for the unpardonable eastern offence of appearing in 



378 YADACE. 

the presence of Christians without their veils ; the witnesses 
are sworn on the Koran ; the prisoner appears at the bar in 
a snowy bournouse ; the galleries are full of Moorish ladies 
in white yashmaks or veils, and Jewish women in jewelled 
turbans ; and the prosecution is conducted by a Procureur 
Imperial in such a square toque or cap, and black gown, as 
you may see any day in the Salle des Pas Perdus of the Paris 
Palais de Justice for a twenty-eight shilling return-ticket. 
There is a Monsieur le President, glib clerks, to read the Code 
Napoleon ; gendarmes to keep order, and outside the court 
a guillotine, spick and span new from Paris, to which the 
bearded prisoner is, in due course of time, led for execution 
in a costume the very counterpart of that which Jacob wore 
when he went a-courting Laban's daughters. In the Akbar 
you may read advertisements of mosques to be sold, and 
milliners just arrived from Paris with the latest fashions ; of 
balls at the ancient palace of the Dey, of a coffee-house to be 
let on lease close to the shambles in the Jews' quarter ; of 
an adjudication in the bankruptcy of Sheikh El Haschun El 
Gouti Mogrebbin, and the last importation of Doctor Tinta- 
marre's Infallible Pectoral Paste. In one column there is an 
announcement of the approaching sale by auction of the 
entire household furniture, wearing apparel and jewellery of 
Sultana Karadja, deceased — I suppose about an equivalent to 
the honourable Mrs. Smithers here. Sofas, divans, clocks, 
jewelled pipes, dresses of cloth of gold, turbans, and gauze 
bonnets are to be sold. The whole reads like an execrable 
French translation of a tale in the Arabian Nights. Alto- 
gether, reading the Akbar, I fancy that I know Algiers. I 
seem to see the deep blue skies, the low white houses with 
projecting balconies and porticoes painted a vivid green, and 
roofs fantastically tiled. The purple shadows that the houses 
cast. The narrow dark lanes where the eaves meet, and 
where you walk between dead- walls, through chinks of which, 
for aught you know, bright eyes may be looking. The newer 
streets with tall French houses and pert French names ; where 
cafes brilliant with plate-glass, gilding, and arabesque paint- 
ings, quite outstare the humble little shieling of the Moorish 
cafejee with his store of pipes and tiny fillagree cups of bitter 
coffee full of dregs. The sandy up-hill ground. The crowded 



YADACE. 379 

port, where black war-steamers are moored by strange barques 
with sails of fantastic shapes and colours. The bouncing shop 
of the French epicier, who sells groceries, wines, and quack 
medicines, and whose smart young shopman, with an apron 
and a spade-cut beard, stands at the door ; and the dusky 
unwindowed stall of the native merchant who sits cross-legged, 
smoking on a bale of goods in an odour of drugs, perfumed 
leather, and fragrant tobacco. The motley throng of officers 
with cigars, and clanging spurs, and kepis knowingly set on 
one side of the head ; of zouaves, dandies from the Boulevard 
des Italiens ; grisettes in lace caps ; commandants' wives in 
pink bonnets; orderly dragoons, Bedouins mounted on fleet 
Arabs, date and sherbet sellers, Jews, fezzes, caps, turbans, 
yashmaks, burnouses, lancers' caps, and felt-hats, and the 
many mingled smells of pitch, tar, garlick, pot-au-feu, attar 
of roses, caporal tobacco, haschish, salt water, melons, and 
musk. 

Is this Algiers, I wonder ? I fancy, erroneously, perhaps, 
that I can divine a city from a newspaper — a flask — a shoe — 
the most inconsiderable object. I have a clear and counterfeit 
presentment in my mind of Leipsic, from a book — which I 
am unable to read — a dimly printed, coarse-papered pamphlet 
stitched in rough blue paper. I can see in it high houses, 
grave, fat-faced children, a predominance of blue in the colour 
for stockings, — dinners at one o'clock — much beer — much 
tobacco — a great deal of fresh boiled-beef, soup, and cabbage, 
— early beds — straw-coloured beards — green spectacles — large 
umbrellas, and a great many town clocks. I should like to 
know whether Leipsic really possesses any of these charac- 
teristics. A worthy, weather-beaten old sea-captain once gave 
me a perfectly definite notion of Sierra Leone, in one little 
anecdote. " Sierra Leone, sir," he said : "I'll tell you what 
Sierra Leone is like. A black fellow, sir, goes into the 

market. It's as hot as ■ well, — anything. He buys a 

melon for three farthings — and what does he do with it? 
The black fellow, sir, hasn't a rag on. He's as bare as a 
robin. He buys his melon, cuis it in halves, and scoops out 
the middle. He sits in one half, covers his head with the 
other, and eats the middle. That's what he does, sir." — I 
saw Sierra Leone in all its tropical glory, cheapness of produce, 



380 YADACE. 

darkness of population, gigantic vegetation, and primitive state 
of manners immediately. 

All this, although you may not think so, bears upon, con- 
cerns, is yadace. But to give you yadace at once, we will 
quit Sierra Leone, and come back to Algiers. 

Few would imagine, while watching in a Moorish coffee- 
house the indigenes, as the native inhabitants are called, 
playing with a grave and apparently immoveable tranquillity, 
at draughts, chess, or backgammon — not speaking, scarcely 
moving — that men, seemingly so impassible to the chances of 
loss or gain, were capable of feeling the most violent effects 
of the passion for gaming. Yet these passions and these 
effects they feel in all their intensity. They lack, it is true, 
the varied emotions that winners or losers express at the 
green baize table of the trente-et-quarante, the parti-coloured 
wheel of roulette, the good-intention paved court of the Stock 
Exchange, or the velvety sward of the area before the Grand 
Stand at Epsom. But no bull or bear, no caster or punter, 
no holder of a betting-book who has just lost thousands and 
his last halfpenny, could ever show a visage so horribly 
aghast, so despairingly downfallen, so ferociously miserable, as 
that unlucky Algerine player, to whom his adversary has just 
pronounced the fatal and triumphant word — Yadace. 

The game is of the utmost simplicity, and consists solely in 
abstaining from receiving anything whatsoever from the per- 
son with whom you play. In order to ratify the convention 
which is established between the parties at the commencement 
of a game, each plaj^er takes by the end a morsel of straw, a 
slip of paper, or even a blade of grass, which is broken or 
torn in two between them, the sacramental formula "Yadace" 
being pronounced at the same time. After this, the law of 
the game is in full force. In some cases, when one of the 
players imagines that he has to deal with an inexperienced or 
inattentive player, he immediately attempts to catch him by 
presenting him with the piece of straw or paper which has 
remained on his side, under pretence of having it measured 
against the other. Should the novice be foolish enough to 
accept the fragment, the terrible yadace is forthwith thun- 
dered forth, and the game is lost in the very outset. But it 
rarely happens, save, perhaps, when one of the players is an 



YADACE. 381 

European, totally a stranger to the traditions of the game, 
that any one is found thoughtless enough to be caught in this 
gross palpable trap. Much more frequently a struggle of 
mutual astuteness, caution, and circumspection begins, which 
is prolonged for days, weeks, months, and, in many cases, 
years. 

As it is almost impossible that the persons who live 
habitually together should not sometimes find it unavoidable 
to take something from one another, it is agreed upon, in the 
yadacean hypothesis, that mutual acceptation may be made of 
articles, on condition that before an object is touched the person 
who accepts should say to the person who offers, " Fi bali," 
or " Ala bali," literally, " with (or by) my knowledge;" that 
is to say, I receive, with knowledge of reception. It is also 
agreed that all things appertaining to the body may be 
received without prejudice to a state of yadace. The Moorish 
authorities mention specially a kiss or a grasp of the hand, 
but they say nothing of a blow. Perhaps they think that 
with a Moslem such a gift could never, under any circum- 
stances, be received, but must naturally be returned as soon as 
given. 

Yadace may more properly be looked upon as a game of 
forfeits than as one adapted to gambling purposes ; but the 
Algerines make — or rather used to make — it subservient to 
the good service of mammon to a tremendous extent. Before 
the French conquest, in the old times of the Dey and his 
jewelled fan, with which he was wont to rap the fingers of 
European consuls when they were impertinent — when the 
Mussulman population of Algiers was both numerous and 
wealthy, yadace was in the highest fashion : husbands played 
at yadace with their wives; brothers with their sisters; friends 
among themselves — and enormous sums were frequently won 
and lost. Houses, gardens, farms, nay, whole estates were 
often staked ; and many a wealthy Moslem saw his fortune 
depart from him for having had the imprudence to accept a 
pipe of tobacco, a cup of coffee, a morsel of pilaff, without 
having pronounced the talismanic words, "Fi bali." However, 
there were many players at yadace so cautious and attentive, 
that they were enabled to continue the mutual struggle for 
many years, in spite of the most ingenious ruses, and the most 



382 YADACE. 

deeply-laid plots to trap one another. One devoted amatenr of 
yadace, a venerable Turk, carried his caution and determination 
not to be taken in to such an extent, that he never helped 
himself to a pinch of snuff, of which he was immoderately 
fond, without repeating to himself the formula, " Ala bali ! " 

If, during the nights of the Ramadhan, you happen to stroll 
into any of the Moorish coffee-houses in Algiers, you will find 
yadace to be a favourite theme with the kawis, or storytellers, 
and groups of attentive indigenes listening to their animated 
narrations of feats of intellectual dexterity in yadace -players, 
and hairbreadth escapes by flood and field in that adventurous 
game. The majority of these stories are quite untranslateable 
into western language, and unsuitable for western ears to hear. 
I think, however, I can find two little anecdotes that will give 
you some idea of the subtleties of yadace. 

Karamani-oglou, the son of Tehoka-oglou, was a rich cloth- 
merchant of Algiers. Five long years had Karamani-oglou 
been playing at yadace with his wife, but without success. 
The wife of Karamani was young and beautiful ; but as yet 
Allah had not blessed their union with children. Suddenly it 
occurred to the cloth -merchant to make a pilgrimage to the 
holy city of Mecca. He was absent just two years and nine 
months ; but you must know that the pilgrimage was under- 
taken purely with a view towards yadace. For the cunning 
Karamani reasoned within himself thus : " When I return 
home after so long an absence, my wife will be glad to see me. 
She will have forgotten all about yadace, or at least will be 
thrown off her guard. She will accept, I will wager my 
beard, a present from her long- absent husband, particularly if 
that present happens to be a diamond ring of great value. 
Bismillah, we will see." Karamani-oglou bought the ring — 
a most gorgeous one — and returning safe and sound to Algiers, 
entered the court-yard of his own house just in the cool of the 
evening. Fathma, his wife, was standing in the inner porch. 
She looked younger and more beautiful than ever; but she 
was dandling a sturdy, curly-headed little boy, some two years 
old : and all at once a golden arrow shot through the heart of 
the cloth -merchant, and a silver voice cried, "Karamani-oglou, 
you have a son ! " The delighted Mussulman rushed forward: 
his face was bathed with tears of joy. " I have a son ! " he 



YADACE. 383 

gasped. " You have, Oglou! " replied his blushing- spouse. 
He held out his arms for the precious burden ; he covered the 
child with kisses ; he called him whole vocabularies of 
endearing names; when all at once he heard a peal of laughter 
that sounded like the mirth of ten thousand djinns, afrits, and 
ghoules ; and looking up, he saw Fathma, his wife, dancing 
about the court-yard in her baggy trousers, and shaking the 
strings of sequins in her hair. From her had emanated 
the dj inn-like laughter, and she was crying, " Yadace ! 
Karamani-oglou ! Yadace ! my lord ! Yadace ! O my 
caliph ! Yadace, my effendi ! Yadace ! yadace ! yadace ! 
Thou saidst not, ' Fi bali ! ' when thou tookest the child from 
my arms. Yadace ! " 

" Go to Eblis ! " roared the enraged Karamani-oglou, 
letting the little boy fall flop upon the pavement of the court, 
where he lay howling, with nobody to pick him up. 

From the foregoing, and especially from the following 
anecdote, it would appear that it is in the highest degree 
dangerous to play at yadace with your wife. 

Hassan- el- Djenin ah was, thirty years since, vizier and chief 
favourite to the Pasha of the Oudjak of Constantine. He was 
the fattest man in the pachalic, and, more than that, was 
reckoned to be the most jealous husband in the whole of 
Barbary. It is something to be the most jealous in a land 
where all husbands are jealous. Gay young Mussulman sparks 
trembled as they saw Hassan-el- Djeninah waddle across the 
great square of Constantine, or issue from the barber's, or 
enter the coffee-house. He walked slowly, and with his legs 
very wide apart. His breath was short, but his yataghan 
was long, and he could use it. Once, and once only, he had 
detected a young Beyjzade, Ibrahim-el-Majki, sacrilegiously 
attempting to accost his wife as she came from the bath, and 
having even the hardihood to lift a corner of her veil. 
"Allah Akbar ! God is great!" Hassan the vizier was 
wont to say, pulling from a small green silk purse in his 
girdle a silver skewer, upon which appeared to be three dried- 
up shrivelled oysters. "This is the nose, and these are the 
ears of Ibrahim-el-Majki." Whereupon the beholders would 
shudder, and Hassan- el- Djeninah would replace his trophies 
in his girdle and waddle away. 



384 YADACE. 

Hassan had four wives, — Zouluki Khanoum, Suleima 
Khanoum, Gaza Khanoum, and Leila Khanoum. Khanoum, 
be it understood, means Lady, Madame, Donna, Signora. 
Now, if Hassan-el -Djeninah was jealous of his wives, they, 
you may be sure, were jealous of each other, — save poor little 
Leila, the youngest wife (the poor child was only sixteen years 
old), who was not .of a jealous disposition at all ; but who, 
between the envy of her sister- wives, who hated her, and the 
unceasing watchfulness of her husband, who loved her with 
inconvenient fondness, led a terrible life of it. Leila Khanoum 
was Hassan's favourite wife. He would suffer her, but no 
one else, to fill his pipe, to adjust the jewelled mouth-piece to 
his lips, and to tickle the soles of his august feet when he 
wished to be lulled to sleep. He would loll for hours upon 
the cushions of his divan, listening while she sang monotonous 
love-songs, rocking herself to and fro the while and accom- 
panying herself upon the little guitar called a qouithrah, as it 
is the manner of Moorish ladies to do. He gave her rich 
suits of brocade and cloth of gold ; he gave her a white 
donkey from Spain to ride on when she went to the bath ; he 
gave her jewels and Spanish doubloons to twine in her tresses; 
scented tobacco to smoke, and hennah for her eyelids and 
finger-nails ; finally, he condescended to play with her for a 
princely stake — nothing less than the repudiation of the other 
three wives, and the settlement of all his treasures upon her 
first-born — at yadace. 

At the same time, as I have observed, he was terribly 
jealous of her, and watched her, night and day, with the 
patience of a beaver, the perspicuity of a lynx, the cunning 
of a fox, and the ferocity of a wolf. He kept spies about 
her. He bribed the tradesmen with whom she dealt, and the 
attendants at the baths she frequented. He caused the 
menfonce, or little round aperture in the wall of the queublou, 
or alcove of her apartment (which menfonce looked into the 
street) to be bricked up. He studied the language of flowers 
(which in the East is rather more nervous and forcible a tongue 
than with us) in order that he might be able to examine Leila's 
bouquets, and discover whether any floral billet-doux had been 
sent her from outside. To complete his system of espionage, 
he cultivated a warm and intimate friendship with Ali ben 



YADACE. 385 

Assa, the opium merchant, whose house directly faced his own, 
in order that he might have the pleasure of sitting secretly at 
the window thereof, at periods when he was supposed to be 
miles away, and watching who entered or left the mansion 
opposite. 

One day, as he was occupied in this manner, he saw his 
wife's female negro slave emerge from his house, look round 
cautiously, as if to ascertain if she were observed, and beckon 
with her hand. Then, from a dark passage, he saw issue a 
young man habited as a Frank. The accursed giaour looked 
round cautiously, as the negro had done, crossed the road, 
whispered to her, slipped some money into her hand ; and 
then the treacherous and guilty pair entered the mansion 
together. 

Hassan-el-Djeninah broke out in a cold perspiration. Then 
he began to burn like live coals. Then he foamed at the 
mouth. Then he got his moustachios between his teeth, and 
gnawed them. Then he tore his beard. Then he dug his 
nails into the palms of his hands. Then he clapped his hand 
upon the hilt of the scimitar, and said — 

" As to the black slave, child of Jehanum and Ahriman as 
she is, she shall walk on the palms of her hands all the days 
of her life ; for if there be any virtue in the bastinado, I will 
leave her no feet to walk upon. As to the giaour, by the 
beard of the Prophet, I will have his head." 

Long before this speech was finished, he had crossed the 
road, traversed his court-yard, entered his house, ascended the 
staircase, and gained the portal of his wife's apartment. He 
tore aside the silken curtains, and rushed into the room, livid 
with rage, just as Leila Khanoum was in the act of bending 
over a large chest of richly-carved wood, in which she kept 
her suits of brocade and cloth of gold, her jewels and her 
sequins. HassaD-el-Djeninah saw the state of affairs at a 
glance. The giaour must be in that chest ! 

He knocked over the wretched black slave as one might a 
ninepin, rushed to the chest, and tried to raise the lid. It was 
locked. 

" The key, woman ! — The key ! " he roared. 

" My lord, I have it not," stammered Leila Khanoum. 
u I have lost it — I have sent it to be repaired." 



386 YADACE. 

" The key ! " screamed Hassan-el-Djeninali, looking ten 
thousand Bluebeards at once. 

With tears and trembling Leila at length handed him the 
key, and then flung herself on her knees, as if to entreat 
mercy. The infuriated Hassan opened the chest. There was 
somebody inside certainly, and that somebody was habited as 
a giaour ; but beneath the Frank habit there were the face 
and form of Lulu, Leila Khanoum's Georgian slave. 

"What is this?" asked the bewildered Hassan, looking 
round. " Who is laughing &t my beard ? "What is this ? " 

" Yadace ! " screamed Leila Khanoum, throwing herself 
down on the divan, and rolling about in ecstasy. "Yadace, 
Oh, my lord, for you took the key ! " 

" Yadace," repeated the Georgian slave, making a low 
obeisance. 

"Yadace," echoed the negress, with a horrible grin, and 
showing her white teeth. 

" Allah Akbar ! " said Hassan-el- Djeninah, looking very 
foolish. 

And such is the game of Yadace. 



POOR ANGELICA. 



In the records of gifted, beautiful, good, wronged, and un- 
happy women, there are few names that shine with so bright and 
pure a lustre as that of Angelica Kauffmann. The flower of 
her life was spent in this country ; but she is scarcely remem- 
bered in it now, even among the members and lovers of the 
profession which she adorned. Those who wish to know any- 
thing definite concerning a lady who was the pet of the 
English aristocracy, and the cynosure of English painters for 
some years of the past century, must turn to foreign sources, 
and hear from foreign lips and pens the praises of poor 
Angelica. Though undeniably a foreigner, she had as un- 
deniable a right to be mentioned in the records of British 
painters as those other foreigners domiciliated among us at 
the same epoch : Liotard, Zucchi, Zoffani, Bartolozzi, Cipriani, 
Michael Moser, Loutherbourg, Zuccarelli, Vivares, and Fuseli. 
Of all these worthies of the easel and the burin there are 
copious memoirs and anecdotes extant, yet the published 
(English) notices of Angelica would not fill half this page. 
In Northcote's Memoirs of Sir Joshua Reynolds, there is no 
mention whatsoever made of my heroine ; nor, which is more 
to be wondered at, is she named in Mr. Allan Cunningham's 
excellent Life of Sir Joshua. Yet Angelica painted the pre- 
sident's portrait; and the president himself, it is darkly 
said, was desirous on his part of possessing not only the 
portrait of his fair limner, but the original itself. Even the 
garrulous, tittle-tattling, busybody, Bosweli, has nothing to 
say, in his Life of Johnson, of the catastrophe of Angelica's 
life ; although it was town talk for weeks, and although the 
sinister finger of public suspicion pointed at no less a man 
than Johnson's greatest friend, Joshua Reynolds, as cogni- 
sant of, if not accessory to, the conspiracy by which the 
happiness of Angelica Kauffmann was blasted. In Smith's 

c c 2 



388 POOR ANGELICA. 



Ale 



Nollekens and his Times there is a silly bit of improbab 
scandal about the fair painter. In Knowles's Life of Fuseli 
we learn in half-a-dozen meagre lines that that eccentric 
genius was introduced to Madame Kauffmann on his first 
coming to England, and that he was very nearly becoming 
enamoured of her ; but that this desirable consummation was 
prevented by Miss Mary Moser, daughter of the keeper of the 
Royal Academy (appropriately a Swiss), becoming enamoured 
of him. Stupid, woeful Mr. Pilkington has a brief memoir 
of Angelica. Wolcot, better known as Peter Pindar, once, 
and once only, alludes to her. In Chalmer's Biographical 
Dictionary there is a notice of Angelica about equal, in 
compass and ability, to that we frequently find of a deceased 
commissioner of inland revenue in a weekly newspaper. In 
the vast catalogue of the Museum library I can only discover 
one reference to Angelica Kauffmann, personally, that being a 
stupid epistle to her, written in 1781 by one Mr. G. Keate. 
I have been thus minute in my English researches, in order 
to avoid the imputation of having gone abroad, when I might 
have fared better at home. I might have spared myself some 
labour too ; for my travels in search of Angelica in foreign 
parts have been tedious and painful. That which M. Artaud, 
in that great caravanserai of celebrities, the Biographie 
Universelle, has to say about her is of the dryest ; and a Herr 
Bockshammer, a German, from whom I expected great things, 
merely referred me to another A. Kauffmann, not at all 
angelical ; but connected with a head-splitting treatise on the 
human mind. 

I will try to paint my poor Angelica. Calumny, envy, 
biographers who lie by their silence, cannot deny that she 
was a creature marvellously endowed. She was a painter, a 
musician ; she would have made an excellent tragic actress ; 
she embroidered ; she danced ; she was facund in expression, 
infinite in variety ; she was good, amiable, and virtuous : full 
of grace, vivacity, and wit. Fancy Venus without her mole ; 
fancy Minerva without her segis (which was, you may be sure, 
her ugliness). Fancy Ninon de l'Enclos with the virtue of 
Madame de Sevigne. Fancy a Rachel Esmond with the wit 
of a Becky Sharp. Fancy a woman as gifted as Sappho, but 
not a good-for-nothing, as wise as Queen Elizabeth, but no 



POOR ANGELICA. 389 

tyrant; as brave as Charlotte, Countess of Derby, but no 
blood-spiller for revenge ; as unhappy as Clarissa Harlowe, 
but no prude ; as virtuous as Pamela, but no calculator : as 
fair as my own darling Clementina, but no fool. Fancy all 
this, and fancy too, if you like, that I am in love with the 
ghost of Angelica Kauffmann, and am talking nonsense. 

She was born (to return to reason) in the year 1741, at 
Coire, the capital of the Grisons, a wild and picturesque district 
which extends along the right bank of the Rhine to the Lake 
of Constance. She was baptised Marie- Anne- Angelique- 
Catherine. Angelica would have been enough for posterity 
to love her by. But, though rich in names, she was born to 
poverty in every other respect. Her father, John Joseph 
Kauffmann, was an artist, with talents below mediocrity, and 
his earnings proportionately meagre. He came, as all the 
Kauffmanns before him did, from Schwarzenburg, in the 
canton of Voralberg, and appears to have travelled about the 
surrounding cantons in something nearly approaching the 
character of an artistic tinker, mending a picture here, copy- 
ing one there, painting a sign for this gasthof keeper, and 
decorating a dining-room for that proprietor of a chateau. 
These nomadic excursions were ordinarily performed on foot. 
In one of his visits to Coire, where he was detained for some 
time, he happened, very naturally, to fall over head and ears 
with a Protestant damsel named Cleofe ; nor was it either so 
very unnatural that Fraulein Cleofe, should also fall in love 
with him. She loved him indeed so well as to adopt his reli- 
gion, the Roman Catholic ; upon which the church blessed 
their union, and they were married. Hence Marie-Anne- 
Angelique- Catherine, and hence this narrative. 

If Goodman Kauffmann had really been a tinker, instead of 
a travelling painter, it is probable that his little daughter 
would very soon have been initiated into the mysteries of 
burning her fingers with hot solder, drumming with her 
infantile fists upon battered pots, and blackening her young 
face with cinders from the extinguished brazier. We all learn 
the vocation of our parents so early. I saw the other hot, sunny 
evening, a fat undertaker in a fever-breeding street near Soho, 
leaning against the door-jambs of his shop (where the fasces 
of mutes' staves are), smoking his pipe contentedly. He was 



390 POOR ANGELICA. 

a lusty man, and smoked his pipe with a jocund face ; but 
his eves were turned into his shady shop, where his little 
daughter — as I live it is true, and she was not more than nine 
years old — was knocking nails into a coffin on tressels. She 
missed her aim now and then, "but went on, on the whole, 
swimmingly, to the great contentment of her sire, and there 
was in his face — though it was a fat face; and a greasy face, 
and a pimpled face — so beneficent an expression of love and 
fatherly pride, that I could forgive him his raven-like laugh, 
and the ghastly game he had set his daughter to. 

So it was with little Angelica. Her first playthings were 
paint-brushes, bladders of colours, mahl-sticks, and unstrained 
canvases : and there is no doubt that on many occasions she 
became quite a Utile Joseph, and had, if not a coat, at least a 
pinafore of many colours. 

Kaufmiann. an honest, simple-minded fellow, knowing no- 
thing but his art. and not much of that, cherished the unselfish 
hope that in teaching his child, he might soon teach her to sur- 
pass him. The wish — not an unfrequent event in the annals of 
art — was soon realised. As Raffaelle surpassed Perugino, 
and Michael Angelo surpassed Ghirlandajo, their masters, 
so Angelica speedily surpassed her father, and left him far 
behind. But it did not happen with him as it did with a 
certain master of the present day, who one day turned his 
pupil neck and heels out of his studio, crying " You know 
more than I do. Go to the devil ! " The father was delighted 
at his daughter's marvellous progress. Sensible of the 
obstacles opposed to a thorough study of drawing and anatomy 
in the case of females, he strenuously directed Angelica's 
faculties to the study of colour. Very early she became 
initiated in those wondrous secrets of chiar oscuro which 
produce relief, and extenuate, if they do not redeem, the 
want of strict correctness. At nine years of age, Angelica 
was a little prodigy. 

In those days Father Kaufimann, urged perhaps by the 
necessity of opening up a new prospect in Life's diggings, 
quitted Coire, and established himself at Morbegno in the 
Valteline. Here he stopped till 1752, when, the artistic dig- 
gings being again exhausted, he removed to Como, intending 
to reside there permanently. The Bishop of Como, Monsig- 



POOE ANGELICA. 391 

nore Nevroni, had heard of the little painter prodigy, then 
only eleven years of age, and signified his gracious intention 
of sitting to her for his portrait. The prodigy succeeded to 
perfection, and she was soon overwhelmed with Maecenases. 
The dignified clergy, who, to their honour be it said, have 
ever been the most generous patrons of art in Italy, were the 
first to offer Angelica commissions. She painted the Arch- 
bishop of Milan, Cardinal Pozzobonelli, Count Firmiani, 
Binaldo d'Este, Duke of Modena, and the Duchess of Massa- 
Carrara, and "many more," as the bard of the coronation 
sings. John Joseph Kallmann's little daughter was welcome 
in palazzo, convent, and villa. 

I am glad, seeing that Angelica was a prodigy, that J. J. 
Kauffmann did not in any way resemble that to me most 
odious character, the ordinary prodigy's father. There was 
that little prodigy with flaxen curls, in a black velvet tunic, 
with thunder and lightning buttons, who used to play on the 
harp so divinely, and used to be lifted in at carriage windows 
for countesses to kiss ; and had at home a horrible, snuffy, 
Italian monster of a father, who ate up the poor child's 
earnings ; who drank absinthe till he was mad, and pulled his 
miserable son's flaxen hair till he was tired ; who was in- 
sufferably lazy, unimaginably proud, mean, vain, and dirty — 
a profligate and a cheat — who was fit for no place but the 
galleys, from which I believe he came, and to which I de- 
voutly hope he returned. Miserable little dancing, singing, 
guitar-playing, painting, pianoforte -thumping, horse-riding, 
poem-reciting prodigies have I known ; — unfortunate little 
objects with heads much too large, with weary eyes, with 
dark bistre circles round them ; with rachitic limbs, with a 
timid cowering aspect. I never knew but one prodigy's 
father who was good for anything, and he was a prodigy him- 
self — an acrobat — and threw his son about as though he 
loved him. The rest, — not only fathers, but mothers, brothers, 
and uncles, — were all bad. 

But J. J. Kauffmann loved his daughter dearly; and, though 
she was a prodigy, was kind to her. He delighted in sounding 
her praises. He petted her : he loved to vary her gentle name 
of Angelica into all the charming diminutives of which it was 
susceptible. He called her his Angela, his Angelina, his 



392 POOR ANGELICA. 

Angelinetta. He was a -widower now, and his strange old 
turn for vagabondising came over him with redoubled force. 
The father and daughter — strange pair, so ill-assorted in age, 
so well in love — went trooping about the Grisons, literally 
picking up bread with the tips of their pencils. Once 
Angelica was entrusted, alone, to paint, in fresco, an altar- 
piece for a village church ; and a pleasant sight it must have 
been to watch the fragile little girl perched on the summit of 
a lofty scaffolding, gracefully, piously, painting angels and 
lambs and doves and winged heads : while, on the pavement 
beneath, honest J. J. Kauffmann was expatiating on his 
daughter's excellences to the pleased curate and the gaping 
villagers ; or, more likely still, was himself watching the pro- 
gress of those skilful, nimble little fingers up above — his arms 
folded, his head thrown back, tears in his eyes, and pride and 
joy in his heart. 

The poor fellow knew he could never hope to leave his 
daughter a considerable inh eritance. Money he had none to 
give her. He gave her instead, and nearly starved himself to 
give her, the most brilliant education that could be procured. 
He held out the apple of science, and his pretty daughter was 
only too ready to bite at it with all her white teeth. Besides 
her rare aptitude for painting, she was passionately fond of, 
and had a surprising talent for, music. Her voice was pure, 
sweet, of great compass ; her execution full of soul. Valiantly 
she essayed and conquered the most difficult of the grand old 
Italian pieces. These she sang, accompanying herself on the 
harpsichord ; and often would she sing from memory some 
dear and simple Tyrolean ballad to amuse her father, melan- 
choly in his widowhood. 

But painting and music, and the soul of a poet, and the 
form of a queen, how did these agree with poor Father Kauff- 
mann' s domestic arrangements ? Alas ! the roof was humble, 
the bed was hard, the sheets were coarse, the bread was dark 
and sour when won. Then, while the little girl lay on the 
rugged pallet, or mended her scanty wardrobe, there would 
come up — half unbidden, half ardently desired — resplendent 
day-dreams, gorgeous visions of Apelles, the friend of kings, 
of Titian in his palace, of Rubens an ambassador with fifty 
gentlemen riding in his train, of Anthony Vandyke knighted 



POOR ANGELICA. 393 

by royalty, and respected by learning, and courted by beauty, 
of Raffaelle the divine, all but invested with the purple pallium 
of the sacred college, of Velasquez with his golden key — 
Aposentador Mayor to King Philip — master of the revels at 
the Isle of Pheasants — as handsome, rich, and proud, as any 
of the thousand nobles there. Who could help such dreams ? 
The prizes in Art's lottery are few, but what can equal them in 
splendour and glory that dies not easily ? 

At sixteen years of age, Angelica was a brunette, rather 
pale than otherwise. She had blue eyes, long 'black hair, 
which fell in tresses over her polished shoulders, and which 
she could never be prevailed upon to powder, long beautiful 
hands, and coral lips. At twenty, Angelica was at Milan, 
where her voice and beauty were nearly the cause of her 
career as an artist being brought to an end. She was pas- 
sionately solicited to appear on the lyric stage. Managers 
made her tempting offers ; nobles sent her nattering notes ; 
ladies approved ; bishops and archbishops even gave a half 
assent ; nay, J. J. Kauffmann himself could not disguise his 
eagerness for the siren voice of his Angelinetta to be heard at 
the Scala. But Angelica herself was true to her art. She 
knew how jealous a mistress Art is ; with a sigh, but bravely 
and resolutely, she bade farewell to music, and resumed her 
artistic studies with renewed energy. 

After having visited Parma and Florence, she arrived in 
Rome, in 1763. Next year she visited Naples, and in that 
following, Venice ; painting everywhere, and received every- 
where with brilliant and flattering homage. Six years of 
travel among the masterpieces of Italian art, and constant 
practice and application, had ripened her talent, had enlarged 
her experience, had given a firmer grasp both to her mind 
and her hand. Her reputation spread much in Germany, 
most in Italy ; though the Italians were much better able to 
appreciate her talent than to reward it. 

Now, in the eighteenth century, the two favourite amuse- 
ments prevalent among the aristocracy of the island of Britain 
were the grand tour and patronage. No lord or baronet's 
education was complete till (accompanied by a reverend bear- 
leader) he had passed the Alps and studied each several conti- 
nental vice on its own peculiar soil. But when he reached 



394 POOR ANGELICA. 

Rome, he had done with vice, and went in for virtu. He fell 
into the hands of the antiquaries, virtuosi, and curiosity dealers 
of Rome with about the same result, to his pocket, as if he 
had fallen into the hands of the brigands of Terracina. 

" Some demon whispered, Visto, have a taste." 

But the demon of virtu was not satisfied with the possession of 
taste by Visto. He insisted that he should also have a 
painter, a sculptor, a medallist, or an enamellist ; and scarcely 
a lord or baronet arrived in England from the grand tour 
without bringing with him French cooks, French dancers, 
poodles, broken statues, chaplains, led captains, Dresden 
china, Buhl cabinets, Viennese clocks, and Florentine jewel- 
lery — some Italian artist, with a long name ending in " elli," 
who was to be patronised by my lord ; to paint the portraits 
of my lord's connections ; to chisel out a colossal group for 
the vestibule of my lord's country-house ; or to execute colos- 
sal monuments to departed British valour for Westminster 
Abbey by my lord's recommendation. Sometimes the patron- 
ised " elli " turned out well, was really clever, made money, 
and became eventually an English R. A. ; but much more 
frequently he was Signor Donkeyelli, atrociously incapable, 
conceited, and worthless. He quarrelled with his patron, my 
lord, was cast off, and subsided into some wretched court 
near St. Martin's Lane, which he pervaded with stubbly jaws, 
a ragged duffel coat, and a shabby hat cocked nine-bauble- 
square. He haunted French cookshops, and painted clock- 
faces, tavern-signs, anything. He ended miserably, sometimes 
in the workhouse, sometimes at Tyburn for stabbing a fellow- 
countryman in a night-cellar. 

My poor Angelica did not escape the wide-spread snare of 
the age — patronage ; but she fell, in the first instance, into 
good hands. Some rich English families residing at Venice 
made her very handsome offers to come to England. She 
hesitated ; but, while making up her mind, thought there 
could be no harm in undertaking the study of the English 
language. In this she was very successful. Meanwhile, 
Father Kauffmann was recalled to Germany by some urgent 
family affairs. In this conjuncture, an English lady, but the 
widow of a Dutch admiral, Lady Mary Veertvoort, offered to 






POOR ANGELICA. 395 

become her chaperone to England. The invitation was grate- 
fully accepted, and was promptly put .in execution. 

Angelica Kauffmann arrived in London on the 2 2d of June, 
1766. She took up her residence with Lady Mary Veertvoort 
in Charles Street, Berkeley Square. The good old lady treated 
her like her own daughter, petted her, made much of her, and 
initiated her into all the little secrets of English comfort. 
Before she had been long in this country, she was introduced 
by the Marquis of Exeter to the man who then occupied, 
without rivalry and without dissent, the throne of English 
art. Fortunate in his profession, easy in circumstances, liberal 
in his mode of living, cultivated in mind, fascinating in man- 
ners, the friendship of Joshua Reynolds was a thing of 
general desideration. To all it was pleasant — to many it was 
valuable. 

Lord Exeter's introduction was speedily productive of a 
cordial intimacy between Angelica and Reynolds. He painted 
Angelica's portrait : she painted his. On the establishment 
of the Royal Academy, she was enrolled among its members, 
— a rare honour for a lady. But the friendship of Reynolds 
soon ripened into a warmer feeling : he became vehemently in 
love with her ; and there is no evidence, or indeed reason, to 
suppose that his intentions towards Angelica Kauffmann were 
anything but honourable. There was no striking disparity 
between their ages. The fame of Angelica bid fair in time to 
equal his own, and bring with it a commensurate fortune ; 
yet, for some inexplicable reason — probably through an aver- 
sion or a caprice as inexplicable — Angelica discouraged his 
advances. To avoid his importunities, she even fled from the 
-protection of Lady Mary Veertvoort, and established herself in 
a house in Golden Square, where she was soon afterwards 
joined by her father. 

At the commencement of the year 1767, Angelica Kauff- 
mann shared — with hoops of extra magnitude, toupees of 
superabundant floweriness, shoe-heels of vividest scarlet, and 
china monsters of superlative ugliness — the mighty privilege 
of being the fashion. Madame de Pompadour was the 
fashion in France just then, so was Buhl furniture, Boucher's 
pictures, and Baron Holbach's atheism ; so in England were 
" drums," ridottos, Junius's Letters, and burnings of Lord 



396 POOR ANGELICA 

Bate's jack-boots in effigy. The beauteous Duchess of 
Devonshire — she who had even refused Reynolds the favour 
of transferring her lineaments to canvas — commissioned the 
fair Tyrolean to execute her portrait, together with that of 
her sister Lady Duncannon. Soon came a presentation at 
St. James's ; next a commission from George the Third for 
his portrait, and that of the young Prince of Wales. After 
this, Angelica became doubly, triply, fashionable. She 
painted at this time a picture of Venus attired by the Graces 
— a dangerous subject. Some of the critics grumbled of 
course, and muttered that Cupid wouldn't have known his 
own mother in the picture ; but decorous royalty applauded, 
and (oh dear, how decorous ! ) aristocracy patronised, and the 
critics were dumb. 

So, all went merry as a marriage bell with J. J. Kauffmann's 
daughter. A magnificent portrait of the Duchess of Bruns- 
wick, put the seal to the patent of her reputation. No 
fashionable assembly was complete without her presence. In 
the world of fashion, the world of art, the world of literature, 
she was sought after, courted, idolised. One young noble- 
man, it is stated, fell into a state of melancholy madness 
because she refused to paint his portrait. Officers in the 
Guards fought for a ribbon that had dropped from her corsage 
at a birthnight ball. The reigning toasts condescended to be 
jealous of her, and hinted that the beauty of " these foreign 
women " was often fictitious, and never lasting. Dowagers, 
more accustomed to the use of paint than even she was, hoped 
that she was " quite correct," and shook their powdered old 
heads, and croaked about Papists and female emissaries of 
the Pretender. Scandal, of course, was on the alert. Sir 
Benjamin Backbite called on Lady Sneerwell in his sedan- 
chair. Mrs. Candour was closeted with Mr. Marplot ; and 
old Doctor Basilio, the Spanish music-master of Leicester 
Fields, talked toothless scandal with his patron, Don Bartolo 
of St. Mary- Axe. The worst stories that the scandalmongers 
could invent were but two in number, and are harmless 
enough to be told here. One was, that Angelica was in the 
habit of attending, dressed in boy's clothes, the Royal 
Academy Life School ; the second story — dreadful accusation ! 
— was that Angelica was a flirt, an arrant coquette ; and that 



POOR ANGELICA. 397 

one evening at Rome, being at the opera with two English 
artists, one of whom was Mr. Dance (afterwards Sir Nathaniel 
Dance Holland, the painter of Garrick in Richard the Third), 
she had allowed both gentlemen gently to encircle her waist 
with their arms — at the same time : nay, more, that folding 
her own white waxen arms on the ledge of the opera box, 
and finding naturally a palpitating artist's hand on either 
side, she had positively given each hand a squeeze, also at 
the same time : thereby leading each artist to believe that he 
was the favoured suitor. I don't believe my Angelica ever 
did anything of the kind. 

Scandal, jealousy, reigning toasts, and withered dowagers 
notwithstanding, Angelica continued the fashion. Still the 
carriages blocked up Golden Square ; still she was courted by 
the noble and wealthy ; still ardent young Oxford bachelors 
and buckish students of the Temple wrote epistles in heroic 
verse to her ; still she was the talk of the coffee-houses and 
studios ; still from time to time the favoured few who gained 
admission to Lady Mary Veertvoort's evening concerts were 
charmed by Angelica's songs — by the grand Italian pieces, 
and the simple, plaintive, Tyrolean airs of old ; — still all went 
merry as a marriage bell. 

In 1768 there appeared in the most fashionable circles of 
London a man, young, handsome, distinguished, accomplished 
in manners, brilliant in conversation, the bearer of a noble 
name, and known to be the possessor of a princely fortune. 
He dressed splendidly, played freely, lost good-humouredly, 
took to racing, cock-fighting, masquerade-giving, and other 
fashionable amusements of the time, with much kindliness 
and spirit. He speedily became the fashion himself, but he 
did not oust Angelica from her throne : he reigned with her, 
a twin-planet. This was the Count Frederic de Horn, the 
representative of a noble Swedish family, who had been for 
some time expected in England. Whether my poor, poor 
little Angelica really loved him ; whether she was dazzled by 
his embroidery, his diamond star, his glittering buckles, his 
green riband, his title, his handsome face and specious tongue, 
will never be known ; but she became speedily his bride. For 
my part I think she was seized* by one of those short mad- 
nesses of frivolity to which all beautiful women are subject. 



398 POOR ANGELICA. 

You know not why, they know not why themselves, but they 
melt the pearl of their happiness in vinegar as the Egyptian 
queen did : she in the wantonness of wealth ; they in the 
wasteful extravagance of youth, the consciousness of beauty, 
the impatience of control, and the momentary hatred of wise 
counsel. 

Angelica Kauffmann was married in January, 1768, with 
great state and splendour, to the man of her choice. Half 
London witnessed their union : rich were the presents showered 
upon the bride, multifarious the good wishes for the health 
and prosperity of the young couple. And all went merry as a 
marriage bell — till the bell rang out, first in vague rumours, 
then in more accredited reports, at last as an incontrovertible 
miserable truth, that another Count de Horn had arrived in 
England to expose and punish an impostor and swindler who 
had robbed him of his property and his name — till it was dis- 
covered that Angelica Kauffmann had married the man so 
sought — a low-born cutpurse, the footman of the Count ! 

Poor Angelica, indeed ! This bell tolled the knell of her 
happiness on earth. The fraudulent marriage was annulled 
as far as possible, by a deed of separation dated the 10th of 
February, 1768 ; a small annuity was secured to the wretched 
impostor, on condition that he should quit England and not 
return thereto. He took his money and went abroad. Even- 
tually he died in obscurity. 

Numberless conjectures have been made as to whether this 
unfortunate marriage was merely a genteel swindling specu- 
lation on the part of the Count de Horn's lacquey, or whether 
it was the result of a deep-laid conspiracy against the happi- 
ness and honour of Angelica. A French novelist, who has 
written a romance on the events of my heroine's life, invents a 
very dexterous, though very improbable, fable of a certain 
Lord Baronnet, member of the chamber of Commons, whose 
hand had been refused by Angelica, and who in mean and 
paltry revenge, discovered, tutored, fitted out, and launched 
into society, the rascally fellow who had been recently dis- 
charged from the service of the Count de Horn, and whose 
name he impudently assumed. Another novelist makes out 
the false Count to have been*a young man, simple, credulous, 
and timid — lowly-born, it is true, but still sincerely enamoured 



POOR ANGELICA. 399 

of Angelica (like the Claude Melnotte of Pauline in the Lady 
of Lyons). He is even led to believe that he is the real 
Prince of Como — we beg pardon : Count de Horn — imagines 
that a mysterious veil envelopes the circumstances of his birth; 
but, when the truth is discovered, and he finds that he has 
been made the tool of designing villains, he testifies the utmost 
remorse, and is desirous of making every reparation in his 
power. A third author, M. Dessalles Regis, not only avers 
the premeditated guilt of the false Count, but alludes to a 
dark rumour that the Beauseant of the drama, the villain who 
had dressed up this lay-figure in velvet and gold lace to tempt 
Angelica to destruction, was no other than her rejected lover, 
Sir Joshua Reynolds ! For my part, I incline to the first 
hypothesis. I believe the footman to have been a scoundrel. 

A long period of entire mental and bodily prostration fol- 
lowed the ill-starred marriage. J. J. Kauffmann, good fellow, 
comforted his daughter as well as he was able ; but his panacea 
for her grief, both of mind and body, was Italy. He was 
weary of England, fogs, fashion, false counts — there was no 
danger of spurious nobility abroad ; for could not any one 
with a hundred a -year of his own be a count if he liked ? 
Still Angelica remained several years more in this country ; 
still painting, still patronised, but living almost entirely in 
retirement. When the death of her husband the footman 
placed her hand at liberty, she bestowed it on an old and 
faithful friend, Antonio Zucchi, a painter of architecture ; and, 
five days afterwards, the husband, wife, and father embarked 
for Venice. Zucchi was a tender husband; but he was a way- 
ward, chimerical, visionary man, and wasted the greatest 
part of his wife's fortune in idle speculations. He died in 
1795, leaving her little or nothing. The remainder of poor 
Angelica's life was passed, if not in poverty, at least in cir- 
cumstances straitened to one who, after the first hardships of 
her wandering youth, had lived in splendour and freedom, 
and the companionship of the great. But she lived meekly, 
was a good woman, and went on painting to the last. 

Angelica Kauffmann died a lingering death at Rome, on 
the 5th of November, 1 805. On the 7th she was buried in 
the church of St. Andrea delle Frate ; the academicians of 
St. Luke followed the bier, and the entire ceremony was under 



400 POOR ANGELICA. 

the direction of Canova. As at the funeral of Rafaelle Sanzio, 
the two last pictures she had painted were carried in the 
procession ; on the coffin there was a model of her right hand 
in plaster, the fingers crisped, as though it held a pencil. 

This was the last on earth of Angelica Kauffmann. Young, 
beautiful, amiable, gifted by nature with the rarest pre- 
dilections, consecrated to the most charming of human occu- 
pations, run after, caressed, celebrated among the most 
eminent of her contemporaries, she would appear to have 
possessed everything that is most desirable in this life. One 
little thing she wanted to fill up the measure of her existence, 
and that was happiness. This is man's life. There is no 
block of marble so white but you shall find a blue vein in it, 
and the snow-flake from heaven shall not rest a second on the 
earth without becoming tinged with its impurities. 



OPEN-AIE ENTEKTAINMENTS. 

Saturday in Holy Week, and Easter Monday, were the 
days on which I went a-fairing this year.* 

On the Hampstead road, by London, there is a place called 
Chalk Farm. There was a farm here, and chalk too, once 
upon a time, no doubt ; probably when the adjacent hill bore 
primroses instead of a gymnasium ; but both farm and chalk 
have long since disappeared, leaving us in their stead plenty 
of dust, a railway bridge with a prospect of the railway, a 
circular stable for high-mettled locomotives, and a big' white 
chalk-faced tavern. Chalk Farm was a famous place in days 
of yore. It is on record that Jack Straw baited there on his 
way to and from the hostelry that bears his name. Many a 
bold highwayman cocking his stolen laced hat fiercely over his 
purloined periwig, and with shiny (and purloined) jack-boots 
bestriding his ill-gotten grey mare with a crop tail, has here 
refreshed himself previous to a raid on the bagmen, the post- 
chaises, or, haply, even the mail-coaches travelling on the 
Great North Road. Many a "hard-favoured man in a grey 
roquelaure and netherlings of blue drugget, with a cast in his 
eye," has here made appointments with wealthy City trades- 
men who had been so unfortunate as to lose a portion of their 
stock-in-trade, and who have here received the " eighty yards 
of figured lutestring," or the " thirteen cards of gold lace, 
four guineas the ell," which had so unaccountably disappeared 
from their warehouses, and for the recovery of which they had 
advertised in Gazettes, Advertisers, and Ledgers, twenty gui- 
neas reward, and "no questions asked." Here, long before 
there was a Regent or a Regent's Park, long before Camden 
had kindly given his name to a town, long before the London 

* This paper was originally published in May, 1852. 

D D 



402 OPEN- AXES ENTERTAINMENTS. 

and Birmingham Railway was either born or thonght of, 
many a bloody duel, with rapier or hair-trigger, was fought. 
Many a gentleman, whose nice sense of honour did not debar 
him from the cogging, the loading, or the sleeving of dice, or 
the carrying, at ecarte, of three queens in his hat, and the 
fourth in the collar of his coat, has here avenged that honour 
(injured perhaps by oak or whipcord of opinionated pigeon) 
by " pinking" or "winging" his antagonist. Many a good 
tall fellow has driven from a drunken brawl to Chalk Farm, 
in the early morning, while the birds were singing, and before 
the smoke blurred the sunshine ; and has come^ home on a 
shutter, stark, bloody, shot dead. 

But there are no Jack Straws, no plundered merchants, no 
highwaymen, and no duels, now, at Chalk Farm. There is 
still, however, a Fair there, twice a-year : at Easter and at 
Whitsuntide. To that fair, last Easter Monday, I went. 

It was a very hot (for April) day, to begin with : tempered 
by a bitter easterly wind, eddying round corners viciously, 
catching nursemaids cunningly, and drifting them all, dra- 
pery, ribbons, parasols, and baby, against old gentlemen of 
mysogynic appearance ; smiting little boys on the hip, and 
savagely sending their caps into inteiminable space, and their 
hoops between the legs of grown-up people. But such a sun! 
such a genial, blazing, here-I-am-again-after-six-months'- 
absence, holiday-makers' sun ; such a blue sky ; such staring 
white robes the houses have put on, and snch apparently 
endless crowds hurrying to Chalk Farm Fair ! 

The Fair ground was not extensive, on this Easter Monday. 
It was an anomalous, irregular-shaped patch of broken ground, 
resembling a dust-heap on a large scale, somewhat bounded 
on the North by Primrose Hill ; on the South, by the Railway 
Bridge ; on East and West, and on all intermediate points of 
the compass, by unfinished houses, and fantastic traceries of 
scaffold-poles. There were booths where the traditional kings, 
queens, and cocks in gilt gingerbread were dispensed; and 
where, in gaily decorated tin canisters, the highly-spiced nuts 
appealed to the senses of the holiday-niakers. There were 
shabby little pavilions, stuck all over in front with the profiles 
of gentlemen with very black features and coats, and very 
white shirt- collars : together with a stock officer in mous- 



OPEN-AIR ENTERTAINMENTS. 403 

taches, a vermilion habit, and epaulettes like knockers ; the 
whole being intended to give you an extensive idea of the 
resources of the "Royal Chalk Farm Artist's Studio," where 
you could have your portrait taken by the instantaneous magic 
process for sixpence — a fact which the artist himself (in a 
wide-awake hat and a blouse) seemed never weary of reiter- 
ating. There were Royal Pavilion Theatres, and Royal 
Cobourg Saloons, and Royal Amphitheatres, where the old 
story of woebegone clowns, dirt, rouge, tarnished spangles, 
and soiled fleshings, was told for the thousandth time. There 
were a " giant and a dwarf," some " bounding brothers," a 
" bottle equilibrist," a " strong man," a " professor of necro- 
mancy," and a " sword and ribbon swallower." There were 
weighing machines, " sticks" (the speculation of swarthy 
gipsies), at which you might throw for pincushion prizes and 
never get any ; there were Swiss bell-ringers, Ethiopian Sere- 
nades, juveniles, who turned over three times, or threw 
" cartwheels " for a penny ; sellers of cakes, sweet-stuff, tarts, 
damaged fruits, slang songs, whistles, catcalls, and penny 
trumpets. Finally, there were many swings, roundabouts, 
and turnovers, which, crammed to overflowing with men, 
children, and women, revolved, oscillated, or performed demi- 
summersaults incessantly ; the motive power being given by 
brawny varlets in corduroys and ankle-jacks. Add to all this 
a little fortune-telling, a little fighting, and a great deal of 
music, noise, and bellowing, with a great deal of dust to cap 
all, and you will have a fairish notion of Chalk Farm Fair on 
Easter Monday. 

Well, the astute reader will say, Cui bono, this oft -told tale? 
Are these things new to us ? Have they not been since Fairs 
were? Have we never been to Greenwich, to Stepney, to 
Knott Mill, to Glasgow Fairs ? Stop a moment : I have but 
treated of the scene. A word about the people who were 
there ! 

Imagine in this broken, dusty, confined patch of building- 
ground, a compact, wedged-in, fighting, screeching, yelling, 
blaspheming crowd. All manner of human rubbish licensed 
to be shot there. There was more crime, more depravity, 
more drunkenness and blasphemy ; more sweltering, raging, 
and struggling in the dusty, mangy backyard of a place, than 

i> d 2 



404 Of EN-AIR ENTERTAINMENTS. 

in a whole German principality. There were more wild 
beasts in it (not WombwelTs) than Mr. Gordon Cumming 
would light upon in a summer's day, and a South African 
forest. You could not move, or try to move, ten paces without 
hearing the Decalogue broken in its entirety — the whole Ten 
Tables smashed at a blow. By sturdy ruffians, with dirty 
"kingsman" 'kerchiefs twisted round their bull necks like 
halters, with foul pipes stuck in their mouths, and bludgeons 
in their hands, jostling savagely through the crowd, six and 
eight abreast, with volleys of oaths and drunken songs. By 
slatternly, tawdry, bold-faced women, ever and anon falling 
to fighting with one another ; and in a ring formed by a 
" fancy," composed of pickpockets, costermongers, and other 
intense blackguards, clawing, biting, pulling each other's hair, 
rending each other's garments, giving in at last breathless, 
almost sightless, all besmeared with blood and dust. By some 
of the defenders of their country with their side-belts (happily 
bayonetless) all robbed of pipe-clay, and besmirched with 
beer-stains. By beggars and tramps, shoeless boys and girls, 
thieves, low prize-fighters, silly " gents," and here and there, 
perhaps, a decent mechanic, or little tradesman, who had 
taken his family to the Fair in sheer ignorance, and expecta- 
tion of some innocent entertainment out of doors. 

Heaven knows, I grudge not the workers their few holidays, 
nor would I for a moment attempt to interfere with the amuse- 
ments of the English people — otherwise than to increase them 
fifty-fold. I love to see the poorer classes enjoy themselves. 
There is no prettier sight to me than the river (even on a Sun- 
day), crowded with steamers, more crowded still with holiday- 
makers dressed in their best. I glory in Gravesend " eaten 
out" on a hot summer evening; in the crowded parks, with 
the merry voices of children ; in Chelsea and Kew, Richmond 
and Hampton Court : in the snug families of pleasure-seekers 
— father in a tail coat that morning intensely blue, but now 
somewhat dusty, and bearing the exhausted provision-basket 
— mother in a bright dress, a bright shawl, a brighter bonnet,, 
and a parasol the brightest of all, soothing a stout baby, quite 
worn-out and flaccid with the unwonted dissipation of the day 
— children tired, quietly satisfied, or elated with the homoeopa- 
thic "drinks" of mild porter administered to them: with, 



OPEN-AIR ENTERTAINMENTS. 405 

may-be, one little misanthrope, who has pinched his sister 
Eliza, and tried to poke his finger through the tapestry in 
Hampton Court Great Hall; and who has made faces at 
waiters, and cried at sentinels, and has been threatened times 
out of number with " catching it." Ail these, with the decent 
young men and women cosily sweethearting ; the simple- 
minded youths, so gorgeously apparelled, so careful of their 
apparel, and so harmless ; the sensible mechanics with their 
wives; the pleasure-vans, the suburban tea-gardens; aye,. 
and the dry skittle grounds, and bowling-alleys, and quoits, 
and field- billiards, I delight to witness ! Though the sons of 
St. Crispin may indulge themselves a little on Saint Monday, 
and the tailors may object to work on a Tuesday, and the 
carpenters may " knock off" on a Saturday, am I who also 
occasionally indulge and object and knock off, to blame them? 
Am I to grudge them their amusements ? Heaven forbid ! 
but Heaven save us, likewise, from many fairs like that I 
have mentioned on the road to Hampstead ! Also from Bat- 
tersea Fields on a Sunday morning and afternoon, all the year 
round ! With the exception of the ground being more exten- 
sive, and of shows and theatres being absent; but, with the 
addition of gambling for half-pence, pigeon-shooting, and the 
most brutal cruelty to animals, in the shape of dog and cock 
fighting, and horse and donkey racing, or rather torturing ; 
they are as bad as, even worse than, the fair. 

This is in the natural depravity of the common people, of 
course ! It is not at all because real education is wanted, or 
because the common folk must get their open-air entertain- 
ments by stealth and while the law is winking, or because 
anybody — saint or sinner, pot or kettle — proceeds on the 
prodigious assumption that the question lies between the 
worst amusements and none ; between the declarations of a 
pet prisoner gnashing his teeth at sour grapes, and the 
striving fancy that there is in most of us, which even a 
lecture or a steam-engine will not always satisfy ! No 
doubt. 

And now, good people, for the first fair I saw this holiday 
time — I have been treating all this time of the second — a 
fair on the Saturday following Good Friday ; a fair at Lewes 
some eight or nine miles inland from Brighton. 



406 OPEN-AIR ENTERTAINMENTS. 

I was at this last-named place early on the Saturday 
morning, on business. There was but little wind, and, when 
the sun shone, which it did almost without cessation through- 
out the day, it was as hot as though the day were July. My 
business was over by a little after ten o'clock. I strolled a 
few minutes on the cliff, admiring the pretty Amazons and 
the bold riding-masters, so conscious of their proud position. 
I held mute converse with one of the most melancholy 
monkeys I have ever beheld, crouching mournfully before an 
organ on which a child of sunny Italy was grinding dolefully 
an anatomical preparation (so cadaverous was it) of the 
Marseillaise. In the midst of the hot, dusty Steyne, with its 
brown herbage, and waterless fountain, and fareless cabs, and 
memberless club and princeless palace, it looked (the monkey, 
I mean) like the ghost of George the Fourth lamenting over 
the ruins of the Pavilion. He (the monkey) spat on the 
penny I gave him, for luck, or seemed to do so ; and I left 
him scratching his head with an aspect of the most dreadfully 
woebegone perplexity. I looked in at the Town Hall, where 
the Judge of the County Court was giving a dreary decision 
about a smoky chimney ; I looked in at the Police Court, 
where an agricultural labourer (with at least fourteen pounds 
of hardened clay on each of his boots) was under examination, 
charged with breaking another A. L.'s head (he might have 
been his twin brother, he was so like him, clay and all), with 
a bench, or a four-legged table, or some light article of that 
sort, in a beer-shop. But I did not incline to Brighton, that 
hot Saturday morning. Brill's bath, Wright's library, bath- 
ing-machines, shell-picking, beach-wandering, or the Ocean 
Queen yacht, with its three cruises a-day at a shilling per 
head, had no charms for me. I determined to walk to the 
station and go back to London. 

The first feat I accomplished, just as the clock struck the 
half-hour after ten. I found the station crammed with 
people — men, women, and children — in their holiday clothes. 
Sussex in general, and Brighton in particular had come out 
in immense strength. Coventry had done its duty nobly, for 
the ribbons were prodigious. Manchester had not flinched, 
and the display of printed cottons was enormous. There 
were married couples with their families, loving couples, 



OPEN-AIR ENTERTAINMENTS. 407 

old men and young. "Ha!" I said to myself, " I see— a 
fair ! " 

I was confirmed in my impression by the sight of bottles, 
and baskets, and bundles. "A fair," I said, "certainly! 
Where are they going ? " "To Lewes," said the guard, with 
a knowing wink. Now, I wanted a little pleasure, a little 
excitement, for I was dull ; hipped, to tell the truth, by the 
heat, and the dust, the smoky-chimney decision, and the 
melancholy monkey in the Steyne. I will go to Lewes and 
see the fair ! I thought. I put my London return ticket in 
my pocket, and bought a return ticket to Lewes. The train 
was very full, and to Lewes I went — to the fair. 

The newspapers said there were between three and four thou- 
sand persons present, and they know best ; to my mind and to 
my eyes there were ten thousand living souls screaming, fighting, 
roaring with gipsy jollity in front of Lewes Gaol, where the 
fair was held. Besides the crowds of holiday-makers who had 
come with me from Brighton, there were thousands more who 
had poured in from the whole country side — from Hove, 
Chiddingley, Patcham, Allinghurst, Hay ward's Heath — even 
from Chichester on the one side, and Crawley and Keigate 
on the other. It was a rare sight ; stout yeomen on horse- 
back, with flowers in their coats and in their horses' head- 
stalls ; lounging dragoons from the cavalry barracks on the 
Lewes road; women in crowds, gaily dressed, very merry, 
holding up their little children to see the show ; white-haired 
old agriculturists in snowy smock frocks, and leaning on 
sticks ; picturesque old dames in scarlet cloaks, that might 
have been worn by their great grandmothers when George 
the First was king ; tribes of brown-faced urchins, farm- 
labourers, bird-catchers, and bird-scarers ; crowds of navvies, 
rough customers — ugly customers to say the truth — very 
chalky indeed, striped night-capped, gigantic-shoed, and 
carrying little kegs of beer slung by their sides. Also, gangs 
of true genuine British scamps, the genuine agricultural 
vagabonds, — incorrigible poachers, irreclaimable drunkards at 
wakes and feasts, enlisting in foot-regiments and deserting the 
day afterwards — hawking crockery-ware, or doing dawdling 
work in Kent — sometimes, in hopping time — brawlers in ale- 
houses — not averse to a little bit of burglary on the quiet, 



408 OPEN-AIR ENTERTAINMENTS. 

with crapes over their faces and shirts over their clothes. 
Also a great many policemen on horseback, and on foot. 
What could so many of them be wanting now, at a fair ? 

At a fair, too, where there were hawkers of cakes and 
fruit ; where there were games and sports going on as at any 
other fair ; where mirth and jollity seemed universally to reign, 
where they were calling for sale " Apples, oranges, ginger- 
beer, bills of the play." Yes : bills of the play ! I saw one, 
printed on play-bill paper, with a rude woodcut at the top ; 
indifferently printed, very indifferently spelt. I read it. 
" The last dying speech and confession of Sarah Ann French, 
executed at Lewes for the murder of her husband at Chid- 
dingley." This was the play. This was the sight the people 
had come to see : had waited from six o'clock in the morning 
to get a good place at. 

All the public-houses and beer-shops (Lewes boasts a 
fair proportion) were crowded. The taps were continually 
at work ; such business had not been done since the day the 
railway was opened. Eager conversations were carried on in 
these hostelries. Had the criminal confessed?. " Did her 
spuk?" the agriculturists asked. Old stagers related their 
impressions and reminiscences of former murders and hang- 
ings. Of Holloway ; of Corder, Maria Martin, and the Red 
Barn ; of men hanged for setting fire to hayricks, for smug- 
gling, and for burglary ; of criminals who had gone to the 
gallows singing psalms, or who had been hanged in chains, 
or brought to life again by the first touch of the surgeon's 
anatomising knife. Most of the better class of shops in the 
High Street were closed ; their inmates were either afraid of 
the rough visits of the mob returning from the execution, or 
they were gone to see it themselves. I wandered to and fro, 
noting these things ; wishing to go away, a hundred times ; 
turning, as many times, my feet towards the station ; but, 
ever finding myself, as twelve o'clock approached, with my 
back against a wall, and my eyes fixed on the black stones 
of the prison, the awful scaffold, and the hot sun shining 
over all. 

All this time the shouting, and singing, and cake and fruit 
vending, were going on with redoubled vigour in the crowd, 
getting denser every moment. Now, bets begin to be laid 



OPEN-AIR ENTERTAINMENTS. 409 

whether the prisoner would die game or not, and odds were 
freely taken ; the proceedings being diversified by a fellow 
screeching out a doggerel ballad on the culprit's life and 
crimes, to the tune of " Georgy Barnwell," and by a few lively 
fights. 

And all this time, I suppose, they were trying to infuse as 
much strength into the wretched woman inside the gaol as 
would be sufficient to enable her to come out and be hanged 
without assistance. All this time, I suppose, (for I have no 
certain knowlege on this subject) there was the usual hand- 
shaking, and the usual worthy governors hoping that every- 
thing had been done to make the prisoner " comfortable" 
(comfortable, God help her !) ; and the usual ordinaries praise - 
worthily endeavouring to pour into ears deaf with the surdity 
of death, tidings of Heaven's mercy and salvation. 

I stood with my back against the wall, now completely 
jammed and wedged in — very sick, and trying vainly to shut 
my eyes. There was a dull buzzing singing in my ears, too, 
in addition to the noise of the crowd. 

Which rose to a roar, to a yell, as some one came out 
upon the scaffold. But it was not the principal performer. 
It was a man, who, shading his eyes with one of his large 
hands, glanced curiously, though coolly, at the crowd, and 
stamped on the planking, and cast scrutinising glances at 
ihe divers component parts of the apparatus of death. This 
was the executioner. He knew his trade," said his admirers 
in the crowd, did Calcraft 

Another roar : a howl. Hootings, groans, and screams of 
fainting women. The crowd swaying to and fro ; the glazed 
hats and batons of the struggling policemen shining in the 
sun like meteors. 

Two men brought, out and up, a bundle of clothes— -so it 
seemed to me, for I am naturally short-sighted, and was, 
besides, giddy and confused. 

It was propped up by some one, while the man with the 
large hands nimbly moved them about the bundle. Then it, 
and he, stood side by side ; and, on the bundle, was something 
white — the cap I suppose — which I have seen hundreds of 
times since : which I shall see to my dying day : which I can 
see now close I my eyes ever so much, as I bend over this 



410 OPEN-AIR ENTERTAINMENTS. 

paper. There was no roaring, but a dead, immutable silence. 
One sharp rattling cry there was, of " Hats off ! " (whether 
in reverence and awe, or to see the show the better, I know 
not) ; another cry there was, a gasp, rather, from thousands 
of breasts, as the drop came lumbering down, and the execu- 
tioner (you would almost have thought he would have fallen 
with his victim), who had stepped nimbly on one side, gazed 
on his work complacently. Then the elements of the crowd, 
swaying more than ever, made a great rush to the beer- 
houses, or refreshed themselves from their own private stores 
— yelling, screaming, and laughing heartily ; then, the cake 
and fruit trades recommenced, and apples, oranges, and bills of 
the play were cried vigorously. 

The moral lesson would be invaluable no doubt, to the little 
children, who played at " hanging" for a week afterwards ; to 
the professional gentlemen, who had been picking pockets at 
the gallows-foot ; to the mothers, who promised their children 
that if they were good they should go and see the next man 
hung ; to the mass of readers of the narrative in the news- 
papers ; to the boys, who would ask at the Circulating Libra- 
ries if the Newgate Calendar was in hand ; to the hawkers 
and patterers, then reaping harvest from the sale of last 
dying speeches and confessions ; to the Railway Company, 
who had not done so badly by their early trains that Saturday 
morning ; to the crowd in general, who saw so brave a show, 
free, gratis, for nothing. I came back to Brighton again, 
and the train was full of enthusiastic sight-seers. Every 
minute particle of the horrible ceremony was enumerated, dis- 
cussed, commented upon ; but I can conscientiously declare 
that I did not hear one word, one sentiment expressed, which 
could lead me to believe that any single object, for which 
this fair had been professedly made public, had been accom- 
plished. 

This, of course, is, likewise, in the natural depravity of the 
people. Verily, they are a bad people these English ! And, 
touching the great open-air entertainment provided for them 
by their rulers, this last-mentioned Fair, they are the great 
phenomenon of the world ; being an effect entirely without a 
cause ! Me. Geote is evidently mistaken in supposing that 
the Athenian Government never presented what is in itself so 



PPEN-AIR ENTERTAINMENTS. 411 

moral and improving a spectacle, but always inflicted capital 
punishment in private. To believe that it was found neces- 
sary, because of their corrupting influences, to make executions 
private in New South Wales, not long ago, would be to attain 
the height of credulity. Shall we talk of any want of real 
education, or of recognised open-air entertainments, and decry 
these great moral lessons, in a breath ! 



THE FACULTY. 



The simple Highlander who came weeping to his com- 
mander after the battle of Preston Pans, lamenting that the 
watch, which was his share of the plunder from the vanquished 
English, had " died that morning," meaning that it had 
stopped, was not so far wrong in his generation after all. A 
man resembles a watch in very many respects. It would be 
but a sorry pun to adduce first, in support of this position, 
the old Latin saw, Homo Duplex — thereby intimating that a 
man is like a watch with a duplex movement. Yet there are 
duplex men ; and those who go on the horizontal and on the 
lever principle. Some of us are jewelled in many holes, and 
have ruby rollers and escapements of price, yet are contained 
in humble silver or pinchbeck cases : while the trashy, ill-con- 
structed, worse-going sets of works have gorgeous envelopes, 
cases of embossed gold, radiant with enamel and sparkling 
with gems. Did you never know an engine-turned man? 
Men who were too fast or too slow ? Men who, being frequently 
in the watchmaker's hands for regulation, go all the worse for 
it afterwards ? Men who, if neglected, were apt to run down 
and play the deuce with their insides ? Are not men as often 
pledged as watches, and as seldom redeemed ? Are there not 
as many worthless men as watches appended with sham Albert 
chains, and showy, valueless breloques ? Has not an old- 
fashioned watch an unmistakable likeness to an old-fashioned 
man ? Are there not ladies' men and ladies' watches ; hunt- 
ing men and hunting watches; men and watches that are 
repeaters ; watches and men that you can set tunes upon, and 
that will go on tinkling the same tunes with sweet and un- 
erring monotony over and over again, as often as you like to 
wind them up. And is not, finally, a man in this much like 
a watch, that, finished, capped, jewelled, engine- turned, wound 



THE FACULTY. 413 

up, and going (to speak familiarly) like one o'clock ; in the 
pride of his beauty, the accuracy of his movement, the perfec- 
tion of his mechanism, the flower of his age — one slight con- 
cussion, one hasty touch, one wandering crumb, one accidental 
drop of moisture, will silence the healthful music of his pulse, 
and paralyse his nervous hands, and leave him a dumb, sense- 
less, piece of matter, prone to go to rust, and fit only to be 
taken to pieces, to form the component parts of newer, braver 
watches ? Yet a man will bear mending almost as often as a 
watch. You may take his interior almost out, and give him a 
new case, a new face, new hands. But when the man-spring 
is broken, it cannot, like the main-spring, be replaced. 

If you will concede the resemblance of humanity to watch- 
work, you will not deny the likeness of the doctor to the skilful 
artisan who repairs watches. There is no such person, strictly 
speaking, as a watchmaker ; the brightest mechanical geniuses 
of Cornhill, Clerkenwell, and the Palais Eoyal do not make 
watches ; they merely collect their separate, already-made 
parts, and put them together. They also tinker and examine, 
clean, and regulate, improve and strengthen. So with the 
doctor ; he is the human watch-mender. He knows the com- 
ponent parts of the machine, and when it is going right or 
wrong. He mends, adjusts, strengthens, and occasionally 
spoils us. As some watch workmen make dial plates, some 
springs, some wheels, and some hands — so some doctors attend 
to the limbs, some to the digestive organs, some to the brain, 
some to the liver, and some to ihe skins of humanity. 

I have the highest respect and reverence for that medical 
aggregate commonly called The Faculty, and I hope that none 
of its members will be offended with me for drawing a com- 
parison between the art of healing and the art of watchmaking. 
For, although the two professions do seem to run parallel, 
there is a point where they diverge widely and for ever ; where 
the mechanist of mere inanimate discs of metal must keep in 
the beaten track of his trade ; but where the doctor stands 
forth, another Mungo Park, to explore the sources of the Niger 
of Life; where he journeys into unknown countries, and 
valleys full of shadows to make discoveries as strange as Marco 
Polo's, to undergo vicissitudes as wondrous as Sale's, and as 
perilous as Burckhardt's, and as fatal as Captain Cook's. The 



414 THE FACULTY. 

Faculty lias had its pioneers, its explorers, its trappers, its 
apostles, and its martyrs. For centuries, energetic and enthu- 
siastic men have devoted the flower of their lives and the fruitful 
harvest of their genius to one great object. At this moment 
there are hundreds of men passing the hours that we squander, 
in patient application, unwearied study, and profound medita- 
tion — applying, studying, meditating upon the site and foun- 
dations, the walls and roof, the beams and rafters, the very 
bricks and laths of that house of life of which so few of us 
have long leases, which so few of us take the commonest pre- 
cautions to keep in habitable repair, which so many of us 
wantonly injure and dismantle, nay, sometimes burn down 
-altogether with combustible fluids, or run away from, taking 
the key with us without paying the rent. 

The Faculty has a literature of its own — a ghastly litera- 
ture, illustrated by a ghastly style of art — as Mr. Church ill's 
shop, and the library and museum of the College of Surgeons 
can show. The Faculty has its newspapers, its monthly and 
quarterly journals, its philosophers, essayists and humorists ; 
but where are its historians '? When are we to have the 
history of The Faculty ? Not a scientific history, not a con- 
troversial history, not even a professional history, but a history 
for the vulgar — a history of the doctor in all ages in his habit 
as he has lived. Surely, if the different schools of philosophy, 
poetry, music, and painting have found their historians; if 
Dr. Johnson could propose, even, a biography of Eminent 
Scoundrels ; if insects have their historiographers, and the 
beasts that perished and the reptiles that crawled before the 
Flood their annalists ; if we have memoirs of celebrated 
printers, celebrated quakers, celebrated pirates, celebrated 
criminals, celebrated children, celebrated Smiths, we have 
surely a right to expect a popular biography of celebrated 
doctors. Let us have The Faculty — its curiosities, eccentrici- 
ties, its lights and shadows ; its virtues and faults, from 
Avicenna to Abernethy, from Ambrose Pare to Astley Cooper, 
from Cardan to Clarke, from Rondelet to Bicord, from Sir 
Thomas Browne the learned knight of Norwich to Sir Benjamin 
Brodie, the more learned baronet of Savile Row. 

The history of medical quackery and imposture alone would 
fill a spacious library, supplementary to that of The Faculty, 



THE FACULTY. 415 

and be a rich boon to the reading public. From the charms 
and philters and dried eelskins of the old half-conjurors, half- 
doctors, to those more learned yet mistaken men, who as late 
as the days of the knight of Norwich believed in the efficacy of 
Misraim for curing wounds, and sold Pharaoh for balsam ; 
maintaining subtle controversies as to the virtues of powdered 
nnicorn's horn, dried mermaid's scales, and the ashes of a 
phoenix sublimated and drunk in wine of canary thrice boiled, 
to later believers in the cure of the king's evil by the king's 
touch ; — from these gropers in the labyrinth of error to the 
more ignorant, more pretentious, more versatile, more success- 
ful quacks of modern times, the Sangrados ; the disciples of 
Moliere's Sganarelle whose panacea for all human ailments 
was a lump of cheese ; the Katterfeltos, with their hair on 
end, wondering at their own wonders; the Dulcamaras in 
scarlet coat, top-boots and powdered hair going about to fairs 
and markets with merry-andrews and big drums; the mystic 
Dr. Graham, with his goddess Hygeia (in the likeness of a 
Royal Academy model) ; the famous and erudite Dr. Lettsom, 
whose confession of faith is said to have been 

" When people 's ill they comes to I. 
I purges, bleeds, and sweats 'em ; 
Sometimes they live, sometimes they die ; 
What 's that to I ? 

I. Lettsom." 

— from the memoirs of these worthies, to the swarming pro- 
fessors, old and young doctors, Licentiates of the University 
of Trincomalee, Duly Qualified Surgeons, Medical Herbalists, 
and advertising pill and ointment impostors of the present 
day, who clear their thousands annually by the sale of nos- 
trums to a besotted and credulous public, we might at least 
learn that whilst in all ages the average of human folly and 
credulity has been pretty nearly equal, still, that side by side 
with quackery and knavery that great edifice of science 
adorned with probity, and science softened by humanity, has 
grown up, which, though far from complete, is yet an honour 
and glory to this century and generation, — I mean the medical 
profession of to-day — in short, The Faculty. 

Yes ; we want a cunning hand to draw us the doctor ancient 



416 THE FACULTY. 

and modern, nothing extenuating, nor setting down aught in 
malice. We want to know all about the ancient disciples of 
Galen and Hippocrates ; how they worshipped Esculapius, and 
whether the cock they sacrificed to him was a Cochin- China 
or a bantam. We desire acquaintance with the Arabian Hakim, 
with his talismans and amulets ; with the despised Jew leech 
of the Plantagenet kings, trembling while he prescribed, and 
oft paying for the loss of a diseased life with his own healthy 
life ; persecuted, reviled, yet with a mine of learning beneath 
his gaberdine and dingy head-dress. We crave to know more 
of those jovial practitioners and dispensers, the monks of old ; 
and whether they took the same kind of physic themselves 
that they dispensed so liberally to the sick at the gates of their 
monasteries, or limited their xjharmacopceia to the rich wine 
which they are said to have quaffed so frequently, and with so 
many " ha-has ! " We seek introduction to the medieval 
doctor, riding gravely upon a mule, with his whole apparatus 
of surgical instruments hung at the crupper ; his quaint skull 
cap, his learned spectacles, his bulky Latin folios, none of 
which could save him from the suspicion of dealing with the 
devil, or from the temptation of occasionally wasting his fees 
in the purchase of stuffed monsters and dried reptiles, with 
perhaps a neat apparatus of crucibles and alembics for pur- 
poses of alchemy. We call for the doctor of the seventeenth 
century, still a learned man, with square cut cap and falling 
bands, but with some glimmerings of facts and science break- 
ing through the haze of his book-laden brains — full of mummy 
and Misraim, unicorn's horn and golden water of life yet, but 
not quite so confident about them as heretofore — meditating 
perchance upon the antiquated prejudices and pedantries of 
medicine, much as a Major-General Sir Peregrine Pigtail of 
the present day may look upon tight stocks, and bearskin caps, 
and flint locks. Then would we be eager for a knowledge of 
the doctor of the Georgian era, in his square-cut coat, flapped 
waistcoat, huge cuffs, powdered wig, ruffles, three-cornered 
hat, and sapient gold-headed cane complete. So on and on 
till the doctor of to-day grows upon us, learned, skilful, 
knighted, broughamed, degreed, honoured, caressed, or cheer- 
fully exercising his learning and his skill in poverty and 
obscurity, but sowing no less than his titled, initialled brother, 



THE FACULTY. 417 

good seed, surely afterwards to grow up into a rich harvest of 
glory in the broad lands of reward. 

Much do we desire cognisance of all these things ; likewise 
when the first fee was taken, and the first consultation held ; 
who invented the charming system of more than cuneiform 
hieroglyphics employed by the Faculty to express scruples, 
drachms, and grains ; what scholiast upon Priscian settled the 
declensions and conjugations of doctors' Latin, and when pre- 
scriptions first came into use ; when doctors began to disagree, 
and when first " physicians was in vain." I should like the 
historian, too, to clear up the story of Dr. Faustus ; whom I 
consider myself to have been a highly ingenious practitioner, 
considerably in advance of his age, but with a fancy for 
cabalistics, table-turning, and spirit-rapping which eventually 
brought him into bad odour. I want further information 
about Macbeth' s medical attendant: — why he wore trunk 
hose and roses in his shoes, while the rest of the court wore 
kilts and bonnets ; and whether he married the gentlewoman 
after the discomfiture of his iniquitous master and the coro- 
nation of Malcolm at Scone. I am particularly anxious to 
know more of Dr. Butts, that wise physician attached to the 
person of Henry the Eighth, and whose duties appear to have 
been confined to looking out of window in the company of his 
royal patron. And I confess that I have an ardent longing 
to know all about the famous Dr. Fell, whether he was a 
doctor of physic, law, divinity, letters, or music ; why the 
great lexicographer didn't like him, and why the reason 
thereof he could not tell. Who is to be our Doctor Dubitan- 
tium on the doctorial question ? When may we expect 
the History of the Faculty in a cheap form for Railwa}^ 
Reading ? 

If you expect such a work from me, you are grievously 
mistaken. I don't know much about anjihing : I want other 
people to tell me; I am as. ignorant about the doctors of by- 
gone ages as a Zulu Kaffir ; though, of the Faculty of the 
present day (and I acknowledge it with a sort of groan) I do 
know something. Yes, the doctor and I are old friends. We 
know a good deal about one another. 

The Faculty was aware of me, of course, prior to my 
appearance upon the stage of men. The Faculty was down 



418 THE FACULTY. 

upon rue immediately afterwards. The Faculty put fetters 
on my legs, and fuller's earth poultices upon my eyes, blisters 
on my chest, worsted behind my ears. The Faculty put 
glass cups between my shoulders, scarified my flesh with 
infernal machines full of sharp steel teeth, and sucked up 
my young blood. The Faculty introduced to my notice 
sundry monsters of a slimy nature, originally from Asia 
Minor, I believe, which arrived in pill-boxes, and drank of me 
till they fell drunk into plates of salt, to dream, no doubt, about 
their father of the horse connection, and their three sisters 
who cried continually, "Give! Give!" The Faculty "put 
rat's-bane in my porridge and halters in my pew," in the 
shape of draughts and powders. The Faculty have endowed 
me to this day with a loathing for orange-marmalade as recall- 
ing horrible traditions of ipecacuanha. It has made black 
currant jelly abhorrent to me in connection with powdered 
aloes; and it has implanted a deadly and inextinguishable 
dread of roasted apple, lest it should be calomel in disguise, 
and a shuddering suspicion of flower of brimstone, when I 
see treacle. I have been rubbed by the Faculty, scraped, 
lanced, probed, plastered, and pickled by the Faculty. The 
Faculty sat by my side at dinner, far more awfully present 
than Sancho Panza's physician. The Faculty denied me 
pudding twice after meat ; sent me to bed when I was broad 
awake ; kept me indoors when my limbs yearned for exercise ; 
forbade me to read the books I loved ; tabooed open windows ; 
banned green meats and fruits ; swathed me in hot stifling 
clothing ; kept me from church, pleading the danger of being 
over-heated, and from the play — the dear, delightful play, 
with its wax lights, gay dresses and miraculous transforma- 
tions — through unfounded apprehensions of catching cold. 
Oh, you little children ; if you could only find some juvenile 
Fox to write your martyrology. Saint Catherine and her 
wheel, Saint Lawrence and his gridiron, Saint Denis and his 
sore throat, Saint Stephen and his stones ; what would their 
tortures be in comparison with your sufferings at the instiga- 
tion of the merciless Faculty ! 

Yet I bear the Faculty no ill-will for all the experiments 
they made upon me, and I dare say that in my case they did 
it for the best. By all accounts I must have suffered under 



THE FACULTY. 419 

dreadful ailments during my nonage. I know that there was 
always something the matter with my eyes, or my limbs, or 
my head. I can remember eyes that looked at me with a kind, 
sad, pitying wonder, as I played about, an ailing child, mar- 
velling doubtless how any of the cheerfulness and sprightliness 
of infancy could abide in that afflicted and feeble frame. I 
can dimly recall words of sorrow and commiseration that I 
hoarded with a child's avarice, when I was very young — words 
from those who must have seen me swathed and bandaged up 
among vigorous playmates, or watched me sitting apart in 
weird and unnatural confabulation with my elders, when I 
should have been gambolling among my peers. I can remem- 
ber that I was taken to a great many new doctors to make me 
" quite well," and to a great many new spots to make me 
" quite strong ;" and I can call to mind that my mother 
had a maid once, with whom she had a " difficulty," and 
who, in the progress of the discussion, threw out the axio- 
matic insult, that I was a " hobject." It had never struck 
me before that I was an object ; but I have no doubt that 
the lady's maid was substantially correct. Yet for all my 
objectibility it seems to me that I ate and slept, and en- 
joyed myself, on the whole, pretty much as other children 
do — that I was seldom conscious of my imperfect and wretched 
state ; and I can understand and appreciate now that infinite 
mercy which, shutting one door, opens another ; which strews 
the road to death with lotus leaves and masks the destroyer's 
battery ; which gives cheerfulness to the consumptive, and the 
one good day among many days of pain and suffering to the 
condemned to disease; which gilds the lips of the dying 
child, with a smile that is as the smile of angels. 

The many doctors that I have been to ! the greatest having 
been the famous Sir Hygey Febrifuge. He lived in Celsus 
Row, which is a funereal thoroughfare leading from Upper 
Tomb Street into Cenotaph Square, out of a little masked 
alley called Incremation Passage. The houses in Celsus Row 
are tall and gloomy. The odour of quinquina, highly-dried 
sarsaparilla, and bitter aloes, seems to float about in the 
atmosphere. The gaunt iron railings before the houses look 
like the staves of mutes divested of their crape. At the corner 
leading into Upper Tomb Street is Memento House the town 

e e 2 



420 THE FACULTY. 

mansion of tlie Earl of Moriarty. Celsus Row itself is almost 
exclusively occupied by the Faculty. There have been but 
two laymen renting houses in it during the last thirty years : 
the Lord of Moriarty, who resides abroad, and one Colonel 
Platterbattel, of the Nizam's army, who, as a punishment for 
his intrusion into the sacred precincts of Esculapius, was 
signally sold up lately, and had carpets hanging out of his 
windows, and auctioneers' placards pasted on his walls. The 
brass-plates as j^ou advance upwards towards Incremation 
Passage are as brazen pages of the Medical Directory. Sir 
H/ygey Febrifuge, Sir Esculap Bistoury, Scalpel Carver, Esq., 
M.D., F.R.C.S., F.R.S. ; Doctor Drugg ; Doctor Pelvill; Mr. 
Drum (the famous aurist) ; Mr. Bucephalon (the world- widely 
known oculist) ; Sir Ackwer Distillat ; and others, have all 
their lodgments here. Grave broughams, or graver carriages 
and pair, driven by sedate coachmen — well read, no doubt, in 
the London Pharmacopoeia, and putting their horses through 
regular courses of medicine — draw up, towards visiting hours, 
in Celsus Row. Footmen clad in solemn black, or — even if in 
undress — wearing sober black-and-white striped jackets, open 
and shut the tall doors noiselessly. Visitors come and go 
noiselessly, and give cautious double raps. Swathed and 
muffled figures emerge from cabs, and totter feebly into the 
houses. Cabmen forbear to slang, and butcher-boys to 
whistle, in Celsus Row. You hear in fancy the scratching of 
pens writing prescriptions, the clinking of the guinea fee into 
the physician's hand, the beating of the pulse, the long- 
drawn sigh, the half-suppressed groan as the patient waits 
agonisingly for a verdict of life or death from the doctor's 
lips. 

For here in Celsus Row, in the tall quiet houses, dwell the 
locksmiths of the gate of ivory and the gate of horn. They 
cannot always find a key to fit; it often happens that the 
lock is so inscrutably constructed as to defy all their keys and 
baffle all their skill. But what it is within the compass of 
human capacity to know, thus much know the doctors of 
Celsus Row. They have the bunch of keys at their girdles : 
the key of pain and the key of solace, the key of sleep and 
the key of exhilaration ; the key that gives strength to weak- 
ness, soundness to disease, cheerfulness to misery. From nine 



THE FACULTY. 421 

to twelve daily, crowds pour through the gates, paying their 
guinea toll, but finding often and often that the ivory gate 
only admits them to a life that is false, and that through the 
gate of horn lies Truth and Death. 

My recollections of Sir Hygey Febrifuge are of a little 
grey-headed man who was always in a hurry. He is still 
alive, I am happy to say — little, grey-headed, and as con- 
stantly in a hurry. A man has a right to be in a hurry 
whose time is worth a guinea a minute. He must be 
immensely aged by this time, and must have earned an 
immense number of guineas. Well can I remember, the 
solemn, silent dining-room, in which I used to wait for 
audience with Sir Hygey Febrifuge. There were two large 
dusky pictures in it, the one representing the knight in his 
academical robes ; the other a huge fruit and flower-piece, 
with a lobster, half-a-dozen oysters, a lemon with a long 
trailing rind, a flask of wine, and a profusion of luscious 
pineapples, cherries, grapes, roses, and vine-leaves. I used 
to look upon these two latter pictures with a sort of vengeful 
feeling, remembering how many delicacies had been forbidden 
to me through the instrumentality of the Faculty. There was 
a massive sideboard ; beneath which there was a metallic 
monument, dreadfully like a sepulchral urn, which I now 
know to have been a wine-cooler, but which, in those days, 
I firmly believed to contain the ashes of dead patients. I 
can see now the dingy red drugget on the floor, the green- 
baize covered tables set out with bygone annuals, defunct 
court- guides, Adam Smith's Wealth of Nations, Lord Kaimes 
on Criticism, and an odd volume of the Annual Register; 
the faded morocco chairs ; the double, crimson-covered, brass- 
nailed door, that led into the doctor's sanctum ; the silent 
visitors waiting, as I was, for the arbiter of health. Here, 
the paralytic octogenarian ; here, the widow in mourning, 
with her ricketty child ; here the wounded officer from India ; 
here, the withered nabob, who had lost his liver, and was 
come hither on speculation to ask Sir Hygey if he had seen 
it by chance come that way; here the old lady from the 
country afflicted with nothing save a plethora of money, and 
anxious to ask the doctor if it were likely that anything would 
ever be the matter with her ; there, the anxious father with 



422 THE FACULTY. 

Ms consumptive daughter — the gentleman of small means who 
had been painfully hoarding up his guineas that his child 
might have the benefit of the great London medical man's 
advice; there, the young exquisite who had been living too 
fast ; the old exquisite anxious to die as slowly as possible ; 
the over-taxed student, who had gained his double first and 
lost his health. ; the popular actor beginning to be nervous 
about his voice, and feeling a warning stiffness and weakness 
in his limbs. Here they all were, mournfully silent — 
wrapped up in their own ailments, or at best speaking in 
stealthy whispers. Every now and then you heard a silver 
bell tinkle, and saw the grave raven-hued servant flit in and 
out ; and then the crimson door opened noiselessly ; and, when 
your turn came (if you had been a duke you could not have 
gone out of it), you were ushered into the presence of Sir Hygey 
Febrifuge. 

Who, as I have already said, was always in a hurry. He 
never sat down, but flitted about, now looking at his watch ; 
consulting his visiting book ; feeling your pulse ; asking you 
short, nervous questions ; convicting you out of your own 
mouth, if you attempted to deceive him ; telling you in half- 
a-dozen words much more about yourself than you could have 
told Mm in a week, and a great deal that you didn't know at 
all ; darting out into the hall to look (gratMtously) at a poor 
woman's leg, or a baby past hope ; popping his head into the 
dming-room to see how many persons yet remained to see 
Mm ; and then scribbling a prescription ; precipitately giving 
you a rule of life and conduct for your future guidance; 
pocketing his fee, and nodding jou out, all with perfect calm- 
ness and efficiency, yet all, so it seemed, simultaneously. 
Visitor after visitor would be summoned, and the same process 
repeated. Then, when his visiting time arrived, the Prince of 
the Faculty would enter his carriage, and drive from square 
to square, from street to street, hearing the long tales ; 
judiciously cutting them short ; giving a modicum of advice, 
a crumb of comfort, a healing touch of life and strength, 
and pocketing the guineas unceasingly. When to this jou. 
add attendance in the crowded wards of an hospital ; opera- 
tions ; lectures in the hospital theatre to admiring crowds of 
students ; and the occasional publication of an erudite work 



THE FACULTY. 423 

upon operative surgery or physiology, you will wonder with, 
me where and whenever Sir Hygey Febrifuge found time to 
snatch a mouthful of food, to swallow a glass of wine, much 
less to give grand dinners, and frequent the fashionable 
soirees, and be the domesticated husband and father that he 
was, and is to this day. 

How many thousand faces must have passed before the 
doctor's eyes ; how many pitiable tales of woe must have been 
poured into his ears ; what awful secrets must find a reposi- 
tory beneath the black satin waistcoat ! We may lie to the 
lawyer, we may lie to the confessor, but to the doctor we cannot 
lie. The murder must out. The prodigal pressed for an 
account of his debts will keep one back ; the penitent will hide 
some sin from his ghostly director ; but from the doctor we 
can hide nothing, or we die. He is our greatest master here 
on earth. The successful tyrant crouches before him like a 
hound ; the scornful beauty bows the knee ; the stern worldly 
man clings desperately to him as the anchor that will hold 
him from drifting into the dark sea that hath no limits. The 
doctor knows not rank. The mutilated beggar in St. Celsus's 
accident ward may be a more interesting case to him than the 
sick duchess. He despises beauty — there may be a cancer in 
its bloom. He laughs at wealth ; it may be rendered intoler- 
able by disease. He values not youth ; it may be ripe for the 
tomb, as hay for the sickle. He makes light of power ; it 
cannot cure an ache, nor avert a twinge of gout. He only 
knows, acknowledges, values, respects, two things — Life and 
Death. 

In my experience of the Faculty, I can reckon no less than 
three knights besides Sir Hygey Febrifuge ; I have had the 
honour of the medical attendance of Sir Squattling Squeb, the 
great Court Physician. Not of this present court, be it under- 
stood, but of the bygone regime of Queen Charlotte. Sir 
Squattling is dead now, I think; and for the last twenty years 
of his life the majority of the public believed him to be already 
deceased, although he was quietly making some hundreds of 
. guineas yearly by his profession. Sir Squattling did not live 
in Celsus Row : but in Galen Square, where he had powdered 
footmen, in coloured liveries — quite Court Footmen. He had 
a sister, Miss Squeb ; age uncertain ; plainness certain ; who 



424 THE FACULTY. 

always carried a wire-work basket full of keys, which, wheB 
displeased, she rattled wrathfuiiy. She frequently gave me a 
cake, which. I liked, and tracts, which, at that unthinking age, 
I ani afraid I did not sufficiently appreciate. He was a very 
white-headed, red-faced, feeble, trembling old man, and, I 
think, wore powder and silk, stockings. People said that he 
had never been clever, and that he had originally been Court 
apothecary, and had been promoted for drawing a youthful 
prince's tooth, with a gold pencil case. I liked him. The 
first time I went to him he patted me on the head, and showed 
me a mighty rolling panorama of the coronation of George the 
Fourth, and said I didn't want any physic just then — it was 
that which made me like him. 

Far different were my feelings towards Mr. GrufBnboote. 
Gruffinboote was one of those men- — a class now extinct — who 
achieved a reputation for great talent and practical skill, by a 
savage and overbearing demeanour. Gruffinboote bullied the 
timid, frightened the ladies, and insulted the nobility. The 
timid people, the ladies, and the noblemen who liked to be 
bullied, and frightened, and insulted, went to Gruffinboote, 
read his book, and abused him continually, to the great increase 
of his practice and extension of his fame. It was my doleful 
lot to be taken to Mr. Gruffinboote ; something, of course, 
being the matter with my eyes and limbs. It was a dark day, 
and we went in a yellow hackney-coach ; but where Mr. 
Gruffinboote dwelt, or what sort of a house his was, I cannot 
call to mind. All I can recollect is, that Mr. Gruffinboote 
wanted to do something to my eyes ; but whether to scoop 
them out, or bleed them, or scrape them, or drill holes through 
them, or paint them with mercury (I have suffered nearly all 
these processes in my time), I cannot now say. I objected to 
Mr. Gruffinboote, certainly with tears ; probably with struggles ; 
possibly with kicks; and it is a fact that Mr. Gruffinboote 
thrashed me. He was a big, rough man, like a fierce school- 
master that had been turned out in a prairie to graze ; and I 
say that he thrashed me — a weak ailing child, with bad eyes 
and limbs. I bear Gruffinboote no ill will, but I think were 
he yet alive, and were I to meet him, I should be sorely 
tempted to tell him a piece of my mind. 

I should fill this sheet were I to enumerate half the mem- 



THE FACULTY. 425 

bers of the Faculty between whom I ran the gauntlet in search 
of health. There was Sir E. Molly en t, the great ladies' 
doctor, who wrote the most complicated prescriptions, and was 
fond of recommending the waters of Maninbad, or the baths 
of Lucca, to very poor people's children, and once prescribed 
chicken-broth and carriage exercise to a pauper. There was 
Mr. Scalpel Carver, with an awful white neckcloth and shining 
white teeth, of whom men said, in a whisper, that he was 
fond of the knife ; though, thank goodness, he never operated 
on me. And, among a whole host of others, there was worthy, 
kindly, Doctor Lilliput, with his morocco case full of infini- 
tesimal bottles, his tasteless medicines, mild and gentle mode 
of treatment. I know that, as a boy, I looked upon him as 
the greatest, wisest, cleverest of Doctors ; but I am afraid now 
that he was not one of the orthodox Faculty, but was of the 
Homoeopathic persuasion. 

I have not troubled the Faculty much since I came to years 
of discretion, or indiscretion. I think I may say, as Sir God- 
frey Kneller did of Doctor Radcliffe, that I can take anything 
of a doctor, but his physic. The last doctor I went to seemed 
to have some intuitive notion of this ; for, when I had gravely 
recited to him the details of my complaint, he gave me a very 
fine full-flavoured Havannah cigar, and ordered his servant to 
bring up the liqueur-case, and the hot water. To be sure, he 
was only a country doctor. 



A HANDFUL OF FOKEIGN MONEY. 






"What have you had, MYr. ? " "Demi tasse, p'tit verre, 
flute." " Six et trois, douze, dixneuf." The civil garcon (who 
has a chin-tuft a guardsman might envy, and a white neck- 
cloth more like that of a Cabinet Minister than the flaccid un- 
wholesome wisp of limp calico that our English waiters twist 
round their throats) goes through a rapid act of calculation of 
the extent of my consommation at the cafe ; where I have read 
seventeen newspapers, and have imbibed two little cups of 
coffee (with a suspicion of cognac in the last) ; where I have 
been served off marble, silver, and porcelain, and have enjoyed, 
besides, the supplementary privilege of sitting, for as long a 
period as I liked, in a noble saloon, adorned with a sea of 
mirrors, whose decorations a la Renaissance remind the spec- 
tator, not unpleasantly, of the Salon d' Apollon at the Louvre, 
• — all for the consideration of ninepence-halfpenny sterling. 
Quite enough, too, you will say ; remembering the three-half- 
penny cup of coffee, the penny "slice," and chicory-stamped 
periodicals of the London cafe ; but I must inform you like- 
wise that I have had the gratification of contemplating a 
shining mahogany counter, with a gorgeous service of plate 
thereon, and an equally gorgeous dame de comjrtoir behind it 
(the noblest study of mankind, begging the poet's pardon, is 
■ — woman), and that I might have played half-a-dozen games 
at dominoes, and have popped what remained of my saucer 
full of lump-sugar into my pocket, had I felt so disposed. 
But, enough ; I will take a walk in the Elysian Fields. I give 
the g argon a ten-franc piece, and he returns me a handful of 
change. He is thankful for the odd halfpenny of which I 
beg his acceptance, not however pocketing it, but dropping it 
into a species of electoral urn, common to his brother waiters, 
and which is the repository, I opine, of their honoraria, though 
whether the proceeds are devoted to the rehabilitation of their 



A HANDFUL OF FOREIGN MONEY. 427 

white neckcloths, the purchase of ball tickets for the " Salle 
Valentino," or the support of a widow and orphan's fund, I 
am unable to say. Then the garqon gives me my hat, and, 
executing mesmeric passes with his napkin, bows me out like 
a lord. Truly, civility costs but little, but it will purchase a 
good many things in this world. 

I cross the Place de la Concorde, always in my eyes a chef^ 
d'ceuvre of architectural magnificence, but in which, each time 
I visit Paris, I still find workmen employed, making it more 
magnificent still. The Grand Avenue of the Champs Elysees 
is crowded with fashionable equipages, chequered here and 
there by omnibuses, wagons, and washerwomen's carts. 
Fleet Street commingles here with Rotten Row. I sit down 
on one of the benches (not on one of the chairs, in good sooth, 
for harpies hover there about them, fierce and implacable in 
their demands for retributory sous), and eye the aristocratic 
turn-outs complacently. There are some anomalous vehicles 
certainly, some queer liveries, and a few samples of harness, 
heraldry, and horses that vrould not pass muster in Long 
Acre ; but on the whole I am pleased. Next to the pleasure 
of having a carriage and horses of your own comes that of 
admiring and criticising those of your neighbours. Provided 
always that you have dined, and have an unimpaired digestion. 

I am a little late, though, for this amusement. Towards 
seven o'clock the grand carriages bear their occupants home, 
or to ministerial banquets. The chief of the State drives by 
in a pony phaeton, handling the ribbons himself prettily, and 
takes the road into the Faubourg St. Honore, where his palace 
is. A long string of carriages and prancing cavaliers, sitting 
their horses more or less abominably to English eyes, follow 
him ; and the carts and waggons bound towards Neuilly or 
Boulogne begin to be in the majority. Meanwhile, I have 
been jingling my handful of change in my dexter palm ; 
glancing at the smirking little soldiers in red trousers, and at 
the bonnes and little children in go-carts and leading strings : 
listening lazily to the tattoo of the drums and the fanfare of 
the trumpets calling home the warriors of France to their 
barracks ; luxuriously inhaling the calm summer evening air, 
and wondering where the smoke can be ; in short, abandoning 
myself to the delights of doing nothing with that intensity 



428 A HANDFUL OF FOREIGN MONEY. 

which only those who are compelled to work hard at intervals 
can appreciate. 

Man being a thinking animal — at least he ought to be one 
— I think a little while I cool my heels in the evening breeze. 
The Elysian Fields are a capital place for thought. A fair, 
with round-abouts, conjurors, and dancing booths, goes on 
continually in one part ; reviews and inspection of troops takes 
place frequently in another ; while the roadway and its inter- 
secting avenues are always more or less thronged with vehi- 
cles. Yet there are shady walks, and sequestered nooks and 
benches, far from the turmoil of the world, and where the 
contemplative man may take his recreation — where you may 
write sonnets to the stars, to Lesbia, or to Pyrrha, get a 
maiden speech by heart, or concoct the rough draft of a love 
letter — and be all the while as free from annoyance or inter- 
ruption, as though you were in the rat-cage at the top of the 
monument on a rainy day, or Sir Simon Stylite a-top of 
his column all the year round. I could think, now, on the 
decadence of empires, the mutabilities of fortune, the state of 
Europe, or the Maynooth grant ; but I find a subject of reflec- 
tion sufficiently ample in the handful of change, which I have 
held till the coins are warm. Let me glance thoughtfully at 
them, ere I consign them to my waistcoat pocket. 

Here is a brave piece of money — a two-franc coin, bearing 
the effigy of Louis Philippe, Roi des Frangais, 1835. This 
looks prosperous, rosy, clean-shaven, well-to-do in the world. 
The edges are neatly milled, the letters and numerals cleanly 
and brightly stamped. The monarch's whiskers are symme- 
trically curled ; I can almost discern a wink in the royal eye, 
a mythical finger laid against the royal nose, and that seem 
to say : ' ' Lyons is muzzled. Jacques Lafitte has eaten his 
heart. I no longer fear the newspapers, for Thiers is minister, 
and Guizot shall be, and Armand Carrel sleeps in Pere la 
Chaise, shot to death. Eentes are on the haasse ; all my sons 
are brave, and all my daughters virtuous ; not a whalebone is 
loose in the umbrella of Orleans." The two-franc piece is 
a business-like coin, a favourite with the shopkeepers, who 
call it affectionately " the piece of forty." Next to the noble, 
the glorious, the bourgeoisie-beloved dollar, la belle et bonne 
piece de cent sous, or " cartwheel," as the commons more irro- 



A HANDFUL OF FOREIGN MONEY. 429 

verently term it, which, from 1830 to 1848 was the fountain 
and main-spring-, the be all and end all of French honour, 
virtue, mercy, courage, and patriotism — next to this deified 
shekel of Gaul, the two-franc piece is the favourite guest at 
counter and bureau. Louis Philippe coined the pieces of 
forty by myriads ; so, on a smaller scale, are they patronised 
by his equally business-like son-in-law, Leopold of Belgium. 
They are not popular, however, with the obese, broadcloth- 
clad, faro-drinking Belgians, who being large and fat-faced, 
resent as an impertinence the advent of a coinage which is 
large and fat-faced too. They even turn up their noses at the 
crisp, classic thaler of Prussia; their delight is in "fiddler's 
money," — battered, pockmarked Dutch guilders, Austrian 
zwanzigers all holes and corners, like weevilly biscuits ; they 
have even a sneaking kindness for the abominable silver 
groschen of the Rhine provinces. 

Next in my handful of change is a franc — somewhat bat- 
tered, somewhat worn, slovenly in what I may call the tire of 
the wheel, but stern and austere-looking, and of an ashen hue, 
very different from the smug garishness of the Philippine 
coins, and the flashy Britannia-metal-like glitter of the second 
republic. The effigy it bears is more that of an " ancient 
Roman than a Dane "or of a Frenchman. "Were this piece 
bronzed, decently notched, and passably spotted with verdi- 
gris, I should (did I know anything of numismatics, which I 
don't) imagine it to be some old medal stamped with the head 
of Trajan or Constantine. But the lofty forehead, the eagle 
eye, the Grecian nose, the exquisitely chiselled mouth, with 
its inexorable lips and rounded chin, the sparse locks of 
hair, and the laurel wreath binding the temples, all belong to 
a modern emperor. The legend is yet clear enough for me to 
read " Napoleon Empereur" and on the obverse, ' Republique 
Frangaise, 1806." This was, I think, after a certain ceremony 
had taken place in the Cathedral of Notre Dame, at which the 
Pope of Rome assisted, and there must have been a good deal 
of the " Republique Franqaise" left in 1806. 

A half-franc comes next. It bears the same head — the 
features more filled out, perhaps, and the expression a trifle 
more thoughtful. Let me look at the inscription. Ah ! the 
poor "Republique" is nowhere by this time, for here I read, 



430 A HANDFUL OF FOREIGN MONEY. 

" Napoleon : Empereur et Hoi ; " on the obverse, "Empire Frai 
gais, 1812." I read, and lo ! like an army the thoughts come 
rushing on me, conjured into life by this worn and tarnished 
fragment of silver. There is the Arc de l'Etoile, behind which 
the sun is bleeding to death in his crimson shroud, while my 
lady moon looks on with a cold unpitying eye, forgetting that 
he will rise again, and chase her from the skies to-morrow. 
There is the triumphal arch, commenced by him, completed 
by the king who proscribed his family, sculptured over 
with the list of his victories — lying wonders, many of them — 
but of which others have filled the world with awe. There, 
in the Place de la Concorde, where the golden pillars and 
fountains glisten ; there, far beyond where the austere pavilion 
of the Tuileries, grown grey in the experiences of slaughter 
and pillages, bodes among the cypress-like trees, and jealously 
shrouds the bloody Carrousel behind, of whose courtyard 
there is not a stone uncemented with gore ; there, to the right 
and to the left, by the marble Madeleine, by the bridge lead- 
ing to the palace of the legislature ; there, down the long line 
of quays, where the boy soldiers are staring greedily at the 
lithographed presentments of his victories ; there by the dome 
of the Invalides, where his maimed veterans doze on the 
benches ; there, on the shining river crossed by his bridges ; 
and there, in the blue distance, where the dismal turrets of 
the Conciergerie point to the Palais de Justice, where his 
judges sit to this day and expound his code ; there, on every 
side, the sign and mark of this man are for a wonder and an 
astonishment. 

But I have not come to the end of my handful of change 
yet. I have a few more silver pieces, and many coppers. I 
finger again another franc — a dull, tasteless, leaden-looking 
piece of metal enough, bearing thereon a very ordinary, 
commonplace-looking ledger-and-day-book sort of head. A 
Dieu ne plaise, though, that I should be wanting in respect to 
the possessor of Claremont — to a sovereign, moreover, who, if 
he had no other claim to respect and affection, has this at least 
from English hearts, that he was the husband of the Princess 
Charlotte. But King Leopold does not shine advantageously 
on his silver coinage. The laurel wreath sits uneasily on his 
brow, and his entire position seems anomalous and uncom- 



A HANDFUL OF FOREIGN MONEY. 431 

fortable, as perchance his corporeal one may be, in that hybrid 
land which has been a bone of European contention since 
Caesar's time, in that fat, fertile country of corn-fields, battle- 
fields, and coal mines, of Rubens' s pictures and Verbruggen's 
carvings, of bread-and-butter sandwiches and hard eggs (so 
excellently boiled, however, that I am privately of opinion 
that the hens lay hard eggs in the Low Countries), and whose 
inhabitants have been so accustomed to be politically bullied 
from time immemorial — from Julius Caesar to Philip van 
Artevelde — from the Duke of Alva to Napoleon — that they 
don't seem to know what to make of liberty now they have 
got it. I never knew a Belgian, even one of the most consti- 
tutional, but who had a savoury relish for the pitiably greasy 
monks who infest the streets and railway trains. With all 
their liberty, " les braves Beiges" are notoriously priest-ridden ; 
and with all their gratitude for the battle of Waterloo and the 
downfall of Napoleon, eleven out of twelve Belgians maintain 
that the English were signally beaten on that occasion, only 
they were too stupid to become aware of the fact. They, the 
Belgians, found out their defeat in what is familiarly termed 
"no time," and showed their superior discrimination by 
running away as fast as their legs could carry them. When 
I visited the field of Waterloo, the guide — who of course had 
been in the battle, though I verily believe he must have been 
in petticoats in 1 8 1 5 — took care to inform me, while pointing 
out the notabilities of the landscape, of the invincible prowess 
displayed by the " braves Beiges " during the battle, and of the 
hideous and crapulous cowardice of the Dutch. He avowed, 
while we were on the field and in the presence of a stout old 
Indian Colonel, who looked liberal but fierce as well, that it 
was a " grande victoire" a glorious day for Britain; but, 
subsequently discussing a chopi?ie of sour beer with me, he 
informed me confidentially that if it had not been for the 
" infame trahison " of somebody somewhere, the English would 
have been ecr-r-rases by the great tmperor. 

Hallo ! I thought my handful of change was confined to 
France and Belgium. But I am in error. Slides from 
between two francs a little shabby greasy disc of silver stating 
itself to be worth " cinque soldi," and current, I suppose, in 
France as a five-sous piece. Whose is the head ? Charles 



432 A HANDFUL OF FOREIGN MONEY. 

Albert, bland and kingly-looking, and bearing the orthodox 
laurel wreath. The legend states him to be "Dei gratia 
Sardinia Rex," and to the best of my knowledge his style and 
title was rightly that of King of Sardinia. But what is this 
in addition? " Cypri, Hierosolyma Rex" — King of Cyprus 
and Jerusalem ? How about the King of Naples ? How 
about his highness Abdul Medjid, Sultan of Turkey, without 
whose permissory firman a single Christian could not go up to 
the holy city. "Why should the King of Sardinia call himself 
King of Cyprus and Jerusalem, when he is about as much so 
as he is King of Brentford or King of Oude ? Why should 
a king tell so gross a fib in public ? Why should he send 
forth to the ends of Europe so palpable a what's-its-name 
upon this twopence-halfpenny coin, to pass himself off as 
King of Jerusalem to the industrials who black shoes and 
shave poodles on the Pont Neuf. But soft: empty boasts and 
lying titles are nothing to Charles Albert now ; and before I 
fling a stone, I should remember that we have glasshouses in 
Great Britain. I should call to mind, that not veiy many 
years have passed since our matter-of-fact George III. publicly 
styled himself King of France — at the very time, too, that he 
was dispensing with a lavish hand the blood and treasure of 
his kingdom, to help the King of France to his own again. 

More coins ! but the coppers begin to have it their own 
way, like the carts and waggons over the carriages anon. 
Here are three kings all of a row. Louis XVIII. , King of 
France and Navarre; very fat, very placid, pomatum and hair- 
powder visible even on the tarnished franc stamped with his 
royal portrait. Charles X., also King of France and Navarre, 
and passing current now for fivepence sterling; he has a wan, 
dissatisfied, mortified expression of countenance, but the thin 
bloodless lips and quenched eye have all the impassible 
obstinacy of the fated Bourbon race, who have learned nothing 
and forgotten nothing in years of exile and woe. And, to 
complete the category of kings in silver, is five-penn'orth of 
the ancien regime — five-penn'orth of Versailles, hoops, hair- 
powder and Madame de Pompadour — a demi-livre — a ten-sous 
piece, bearing the vera effigies of Louis XV., the well-beloved. 
Ah ! Louis the well-beloved ; if you could only ponder over 
my handful of change, and see how the seeds of love you 



A HANDFUL OF FOKEIGN MONET. 433 

sowed, fructified into a harvest of blood and tears, when the 
gross copper sous of your grandson Louis XVI. came into 
circulation ! The obverse sides of these three kingly coins 
bear also the arms of France and Navarre : the crown, the 
shield argent, and three fleurs-de-lis. These were the arms of 
France, but shall be never, never more, I think. 

Come we to the coppers. Here we progress towards some- 
thing like a uniformity of coinage. The monetary chaos on 
the silver side is relieved by the sober aspect of these pieces 
of one or two sous. But what sobriety ? The sobriety of 
Louis XVI., by the grace of God, in 1779, trembling on his 
throne, pricked by encyclopedical pens sharpened with regicide 
penknives — of the same Louis, no longer King of France but 
" Roi des Frangais," in the " third year of liberty," 1792 — of 
the same Louis, backed with the republican fasces and the 
legend "lafoi, la loi, le roi," in 1793 — and finally, the sobriety 
of these sprawling rugged two-sous pieces — les gros sous of 
the republic one and indivisible, cast from church bells, monu- 
mental brasses, bronze candlesticks and palace gates, and 
stamped with the head of a brazen woman with dishevelled 
hair and a red nightcap. Stay ! One little silver piece yet 
remains : so thin, so fragile is it, that it has lain perdue 
between two of these corpulent democratic pence. But for all 
it is of silver, and bright, and neatly milled, and worth full 
twenty centimes ; it is also democratic, and claims kindred with 
Madame Republique in the nightcap. This little coin is dated 
1848, and bears the head of a female in a semi-Grecian 
costume, a sort of medley of Madame Tallien, Lais, Aspasia, 
and Mademoiselle Mars. It bears for legend the redoubtable 
words, " liberte, egalite, fraternite" (similar inscriptions on 
the walls and public edifices were unfortunately grazed there- 
from by stray cannon-balls that inaugurated the famous coup- 
(Ve'tat in December 1851). Liberty, equality, fraternity! 
Oh, liberty ! — oh, Madame Roland, what right have I to take 
your words out of your mouth ? . 

The sun has sunk to rest ; the twilight has commenced and 
ended, while I have been pondering ; and when I raise my 
eyes from my handful of change, I am dazzled by the gas- 
light festoons from the " Chateau des Fleurs " close by, and 
light suddenly upon an animated tableau of Paris by night. 

F F 



434 A HANDFUL OF FOREIGN MONEY. 

Students and grisettes are hurrying to the joys of the polka, and 
the valse a deux temps. Open air concerts have commenced, 
which those who choose to invest capital in the purchase of 
cooling beverages are privileged to witness in garden chairs 
before little marble tables, where they listen as luxuriously to 
the strains of Donizetti and Bellini as though they were ama- 
teurs in their well-cushioned stalls at the opera. So much for 
the aristocracy, but, the vile multitude, as M. Thiers politely 
termed them — in the shape of good-humoured soldiers and 
bearded connoisseurs in blouses, are kept from the penetralia of 
the cafe concert by a ring fence, and pass criticisms on the 
ravishing strains which greet their ears through the leaves of 
the trees and the fumes of the very strong tobacco emitted by 
their and their companions' pipes. The highway resounds 
now with broughams and coupes with brilliant lamps, hasten- 
ing to ball or soiree. Franconi's Cirque Olyrnpicjue is sur- 
rounded by playbill sellers and loungers between the entertain- 
ments, while, from the open skylights, pour enlivening gushes 
of equestrian music. The man with the dancing dogs has led 
his dramatic company home to their kennel ; the proprietor of 
the rouge et noir table, with whom the young and simple play 
for macaroons and lose, has also retired — to try his infallible 
martingale, I suppose, in the privacy of domestic life. But, 
the magicians yet remain in full force ; the vendors of elixirs, 
unctions, and lotions, expatiate with the full force of their 
lungs on the unrivalled efficacy of their nostrums ; the pro- 
fessors of electricity and galvanism paralyse whole strings of 
little boys. Swords are swallowed, flames vomited, duets and 
trios chanted, merry-go-rounds revolve ; we have all the fun 
of the fair without any of the fighting. 

Not towards these, do my thoughts incline this summer 
evening. Still, do I fumble my handful of change ; still, do 
I meditate on these dull and mute pieces of metal. Ah ! could 
some power endue them with tongues, though but for a 
moment, what eloquent tongues theirs would be ! what lessons 
of history would be poured into my ears ! Of all memoirs, 
what could be more interesting, more enthralling, more wofully 
instructive, than those of these silver and copper tokens ? 
Who is to write the history of money, and when shall it be 
written? Who shall trace the history of the widow's mite, 



A HANDFUL OF FOREIGN MONEY. 435 

of Cessar's tribute, of the forty pieces of silver with, which the 
potter's field was bought ? 

Of these pieces of money I hold, thou, O Palace of Tuileries, 
lowering in the night, with one solitary illumined window like 
a glowworm in the midst, hast seen the birth and the career ! 
Could the walls speak ; could the windows be mirrors ; could 
these inanimate heads start from their silver or copper frames ; 
what tales would they tell ! They are but emblems and sym- 
bols; and the men of whom they are shallow counterfeits, 
are dust. 

As I muse, a gentleman who has stopped to observe me, 
taking me perhaps for a despondent lover, or a dramatic author 
meditating a complicated plot, accidentally lets fall a five-franc 
piece close to me. As he stoops to pick it up, I observe that 
it is new and bright ; and the light from a gas jet falling on 
it, I can discern a head as yet unknown to me, on gold, or 
silver, or on copper, but which is soon to be, they say, on all : — 
an aquiline nose, a pendant jaw, a thick moustache and 
imperial, and Louis Napoleon Bonaparte, 1852. So runs 
the world. There was a Member of Parliament, I have heard, 
who once seriously contemplated bringing in a bill for the 
abolition of Hansard, exposing, as that publication did, such 
inconvenient discrepancies between the opinions of honourable 
members from session to session. I wonder whether we shall 
ever have a ruler, who, remembering that comparisons are 
odious, will call in or deface all the moneys of his predecessors. 
As it is, a handful of small French change is a course of 
lectures, in miniature, on the history of France. 



f f 2 



EOGEK THE MONK. 



t of 
re a 



Every one that has read (and who, claiming benefit 
clergy, has not read?) the Ingoldsby Legends, must have 
distinct remembrance of Roger the Monk. Every reader of 
that collection of wit, playful fancy, and jocose learning, must 
have simpered, or smiled, or "loffed heartylie," at the famous 
lines,' — 

"And Roger the Monk 
Got excessively drunk, 
So they put him to bed, and they tucked him in! " 

We have grown so accustomed to consider Roger the Monk 
merely in the light of an ecclesiastic, who, in the dubious 
period of chronology known as " once upon a time " got 
" excessively drunk," that any other claims he may have had 
either to notice or celebrity have been overlooked or forgotten. 
You may — says the saw — as well hang a dog as give him a 
bad name : Roger the Monk has been branded as a toper by 
the facetious bard of Tappington Everard ; and though it is 
very probable that he was a pious, learned, and virtuous 
ecclesiastic prior to his indulgence in fermented beverages, 
and although we are assured by Master Ingoldsby himself, 
that, repenting, Roger subsequently joined the Teetotal Society, 
and assume that he walked in many processions with many 
banners, yet the brand of the wine-pot will stick to Roger the 
Monk as indelibly as the D to a deserter, or the fatal letters 
F O R C A T to the shoulder of a French convict; and 
the convivial ecclesiastic will be known as an incorrigible 
drunkard till Jack Cade come again, and it be death to have 
a knowledge of reading and writing. 

Roger the Monk did something more, indeed, than get 
excessively drunk. I have a Roger to deal with, an' you will 
listen to me. Not Roger Bacon, the inventor of gunpowder, 



EOGER THE MONK. 437 

chemistry, and the brazen head ; but another Roger, another 
monk, a historian, and not a savant. My Roger is Roger de 
Wendover, a monk of the Abbey of St. Aiban's, afterwards 
prior of Belvoir, from which preferment he was deposed by 
Walter de Trumpington, twenty-second Abbot of St. Aiban's, 
on the ground of his excessive extravagance (dissolute Roger !), 
and ultimately a monk again in his own Abbey of St. Aiban's, 
where he died in the year 1237, on the 6th of May thereof. 

Very little indeed is known of Roger the Monk. He was 
promoted in the reign of John, anjd his degradation took place 
soon after the accession of Henry the Third. He might have 
droned his life away in the obscure ease, and amidst the 
unfructifyiDg erudition of a provincial monastery — have been 
duly tolled for at his death by a bandy-legged sacristan, 
chanted and prayed over by his brethren, and as completely 
forgotten immediately afterwards as the Walderes, Sugwalds, 
Egulfs, Wigeres, Kinewales, Suiwulfs, Wulsis, Estans, and 
many more, his name might have been writ in water had it 
not occurred to him (astute Roger!) to write a chronicle 
called " The Flowers of History," containing an abridged 
narrative of the history of the world from its creation till the 
year 1235, the nineteenth year of King Henry the Third. 
The first part of " The Flowers" * extends from Adam and 
Eve to a.d. 447, when Hengist and Horsa, and those stout 
Saxons came over to England to amuse the Britons with a 
species of acting charade embodying the popular fable of the 
farmer who called in the huntsman and hounds to destroy the 
hares in his garden. All this Roger has copied from the 
most mendacious Greek and Latin authors, and from that 
audacious writer — that dark-age Dumas — Geoffrey of Mon- 
mouth. The second part comprises from a.d. 447 to circa 
a.d. 1 2 0. . In this Roger has consulted Sigebert of Gemblours, 
Hermanus Contractus, William of Malmesbury, the Byzantine 
historians, Bede, Cedrenus, &c. With respect to this second 
part being an authentic history, I may content myself with 
remarking that the members of the Jewish persuasion may 

* Roger de Wendover's Flowers of History ; the Latin Edition, by the Rev. 
H. 0. Coxe, of the Bodleian Library, published by the English Historical 
Society. Translated by J. A. Giles, D.C.L., late fellow *of Corpus Christi 
College, Oxford. H. G. Bohn, London. 1849. 



438 ROGER THE MONK. 

attach credibility to it, but that I won't. The third part 
extends from 1200 to 1235, and in it, says Roger's editor, 
" he rises into the character of an original writer." I am 
truly glad to hear of that elevation, but I am concerned to 
say that he does not rise in my estimation as a teller of truth. 

I have been reading Roger lately very attentively and 
patiently. I have marked his assertions, digested his anec- 
dotes, weighed his periods, plodded through his crabbed 
paragraphs. I have risen from the perusal of Roger (and I 
grieve to say so) with one settled and fixed conviction — that 
I don't believe Roger the Monk. More than this ; I am not 
an unbeliever, generally, I hope. I have read Paley, and the 
French author who wrote " The Words of a Believer," but 
I can't believe in any ante-Norman History of England, because 
the chronicle of Mathew Paris, on which almost all our early 
histories are founded, has been lately discovered (by Roger's 
learned editor) to contain embodied therein, verbatim et literatim, 
the " Flowers of History " of Roger de Wendover ; secondly, 
because the work of Roger de Wendover, who was copied by 
the first-named author, is as full of impossibilities as an egg 
is full of meat, as a stack is full of straws, as an Act of 
Parliament is full of flaws. 

Any good that Roger de Wendover has done is certainly 
interred with his bones. The evil that he has done lives after 
him. He has poisoned the well of history undefiled ; he has 
crammed more falsehoods into two octavo volumes than 
herrings could be crammed into a barrel. He has lied not 
for an age, but for all time ; and the most distressing circum- 
stances connected with his mendacity is, that so many are the 
lies — so often do we catch him Munchausenising — that we 
don't know when to believe him. It is the boy and the wolf 
over again. When we find, wedged sandwich-fashion between 
two palpable falsehoods, the story of King Alfred and the 
neatherd, of Canute and his courtiers, of William the Nor- 
man's invasion, how are we to know that Roger is not lying 
yet ? I am sorry I have read Roger ; sorry that Herr 
Niebuhr should have demolished Livy, and that Mr. Macaulay 
should have agreed with Niebuhr ; sorry that Horace Walpole 
should have explained away Richard the Third's murders. 
I am always sorry to be disillusioned. After love there's 






ROGER THE MONK. 439 

nothing* half so sweet as History's young dream. After 
Roger's lies, how am I to place credence in King Alfred ? I 
shake my head at him. The forty Royal Academicians may 
find the body of Harold now, as often as they like, and bury 
him, but I shall not go to the funeral. Was there ever a 
Fair Rosamond ? Did Richard the First ever fight at Ascalon ? 
A man don't know what to believe. Let me briefly and 
rapidly run through Roger. 

Beginning in 447, Roger describes the inviting over of 
Hengist and Horsa, and tells us the stories of Vortigern and 
Rowena, and of the wars of King Vortimer, of the Picts and 
Scots, Merovius, King of the Franks, of the Emperor Valen- 
tinian, and of the Council of Chalcedon, in a very sensible, 
business-like, historical manner. He even mentions the 
cathedral of Saint Stephen, but with no fewer than three 
cock-and-bull stories. One concerning Severus, " a man re- 
markable for miraculous powers," and the " blessed Ger- 
manus." The former built the Vienna cathedral, and the 
latter had promised to attend at its dedication ; but — happening 
to die at Ravenna, was there buried, " not without many 
miracles " — it might be reasonably supposed that he did not 
keep his appointment. No : hear Roger. " It fell out, that 
on the very day of the dedication, and before the service had 
commenced, the most blessed body of Germanus was taken 
into that new church while they rested ; and thus the promise 
of that man of God was fulfilled." A highly credible miracle, 
provided always that no collusion existed between Saint Severus, 
" the man remarkable for miraculous powers," and the 
undertaker's men. Again, this romancing Roger tells us (on 
the authority of the arch-deceiver, Geoffrey of Monmouth) that 
Vortigern gave Hengist as much land as could be surrounded 
by a bull's hide, which the artful Saxon cut into long narrow 
thongs, and so surrounded a great expanse of earth with his 
leathern cordon. Ingenious and picturesque, but unhappily 
not original. Have we not an exactly similar story concerning 
Queen Dido of Carthage ? And is it likely that the Wodin- 
worshipping Hengist was familiar with the writings of the 
ancients ? Shortly afterwards we are favoured by a genteel 
anecdote applying to Saint Mamertus, Bishop of Vienna ; who, 
keeping a vigil, and in the midst of a terrible conflagration 



440 ROGER THE MONK, 

which was devastating the city, with, a flood of tears re- 
strained the violence of the fire. Oh, how are we to believe 
in Hengist and Horsa, Yortigern and Rowena, after these 
bouncers ! 

In the paragraph immediately following, Roger gravely 
writes under the capitular title of " Discovery of the head of 
Saint John" — just as a penny-a-liner might record on his 
flimsy, " Discovery of the head of the murdered woman " — that 
" in the year of grace 458, two Eastern monks having gone 
up to Jerusalem to worship, he revealed to them the place of his 
head, near the house where Herod formerly lived. It was 
straightway brought to Edessa, a city of Phoenicia, and there 
buried with due honour." 

" In the year of grace" (says Roger) "461, Hengist, hearing 
of the death of Vortimer, returned into Britain with three 
hundred thousand warriors." I don't believe that Hengist 
ever mustered a tithe of that number of warriors ; yet every 
respectable historian has copied the. assertion; and if I, being 
at school, had ever dared to question the veracity of the 
standard historian 4 of my school, I should have been flogged. 
I place as little credence in Roger's minute description of the 
May-day banquet offered by Hengist to the Britons at the 
village of Ambrius, where every Saxon had a carving-knife 
stuck in his stocking, with which, in the interval between 
dinner and dessert, they treacherously slew their guests. I 
believe that banquet to have taken place just as much as 
I believe to have been present thereat the famous ancestor of 
Mr. Jonathan Wild the great, nicknamed " Langfanger," 
who was rather hard of hearing, and mistook the order to cut 
the visitors' throats for one to cut their purses, which he did 
instanter. 

Gravely again, Roger tells us that, in the year 464, the 
Britons, disconsolate at the grievous tyranny of the Saxons, 
sent messengers into Britain to Aurelius Ambrosius and his 
brother Uterpendragon, beseeching them to come and extirpate 
Hengist. Likely enough: but why does the imprudent Roger, 
reversing his own trustworthiness, like a cow kicking over a 
bucket of her own milk, tell us that King Yortigern, hearing 
of the proposed expedition of Uterpendragon, called together 
his magicians to take counsel as to what was to be done under 



ROGER THE MONK. 441 

the circumstances ? That the magicians advised him to build 
a strong tower of defence for himself and friends, and that he 
commenced one near a certain Mount Erir ; but that, as soon 
as the masons began to build, the earth swallowed up every 
night what they had done in the day. That, on his inquiry 
as to the causes of this architectural failure, the magicians 
advised him to seek out a youth without a father, and to 
sprinkle the mortar and stones with his blood, which would 
give solidity to the work. That, the fatherless youth being 
found at Carmarthen, he turned out to be the son of the 
King of Demicia's daughter, his papa having basely deserted 
and left him chargeable to his parish. That, astonished at 
this recital, the king called to the youth and asked for 
his card. That he was no other than the Dobler or Robert 
Houdin of his epoch, the marvel- working Merlin Ambrosius ; 
that utterly (and wisely I think) repudiating the notion that 
the irrigation of the tower with his blood was in any way 
necessary to its stability, he up and said : " Command thy 
magicians to come before me, and I will convict them of 
inventing lies ; for, not knowing what is under the foundation 
of thy work, they thought to satisfy thee by falsehood. But 
call thy workmen, my lord and king, and command them to 
dig into the earth, and thou shalt discover a pool underneath, 
which is the cause that thy work doth not stand." That this 
being done, all was found exactly as Merlin had said, where- 
upon he up again, and said to the magicians, " Tell me now, 
ye base sycophants, what there is lying at the bottom of the 
pool ? " That the incapable magicians were, at this query, 
familiarly so to speak, dumbfoundered. That, for the third 
time, Merlin up again and said : " Give orders that the pool 
may be drained, and thou wilt find at the bottom two dragons 
asleep in them." That the pool was emptied, the dragons 
found, and the magicians brought to great shame and con- 
fusion. I sincerely hope they were, and that Merlin, through 
the success which had attended his ingenious clairvoyance, 
obtained an extended connection as a professor of prestidigi- 
tation, and exhibited his skill to numerous and distinguished 
audiences. 

In the year of grace 561, Roger would fain have us believe 
Saint Brandon flourished in Scotland, for which, in the manner 



442 ROGER THE MONK. 

of the country, we are told to read Ireland ; the Irish being 
anciently known as Scots. What " nourishing" was, literally, 
I never could well understand; unless, indeed, the Saints 
really flourished and convoluted their limbs and heads from 
side to side, as their effigies do in monumental brasses, painted 
windows, and in certain performances of the pre-Raffaelite 
school. However, Saint Brandon flourished, and for about 
seven years went flourishing about the world in quest of the 
Fortunate Islands, which it is almost superfluous to say jbe 
did not find. Machutus, who accompanied him, was famous 
for his miracles and sanctity ; though how far these eminent 
qualities could have been available in what appears to have 
been a sort of filibustering expedition in quest of gold diggings, 
I am unable to determine. Being exasperated by the Britons, 
it occurred to Saint Brandon to show his miracles and sanctity 
by cursing them ; through which the miserable Britons suf- 
fered many plagues and grievous afflictions. But Saint 
Brandon was not only a man of miracles and sanctity, but 
a saint possessing no ordinary degree of prudence ; for, after 
cursing the Britons, he wisely " passed over to Gaul, where, 
under Leontius, Bishop of Saintonge, he was eminent for his 
many virtues." Subsequently, Saint Brandon appears to have 
relinquished the character of an ecclesiastical Sam Hall, and 
to have uncursed the Britons, who thereupon throve and 
prospered exceedingly. 

In 563, Priscian, the grammarian and orator (whose head 
has been so frequently in need of vinegar and brown paper, 
these last thirteen hundred years), flourished at Rome. He 
turned the Acts of the Apostles into hexameter verse. Very 
good ; very credible, Roger : there is a respectable amount of 
verisimilitude in this statement ; but why do you destroy your 
own credit by telling that in 562 a mountain on the river 
Rhone bellowed for many days, and then jumped into the 
river, with "many churches, houses, men, and beasts?" — 
that in the year 573, the Spaniards and the Gauls disagreed 
concerning the observance of Easter, the Spaniards keeping it 
on the 21st of March, and the Gauls on the 18th of April, 
that it was " miraculously " proved that the Gauls were in 
the right, inasmuch as all the fonts in Spain which were 
wont to be " miraculously " filled on Easter Sunday, did so 



ROGER THE MONK. 443 

" miraculously " and spontaneously fill themselves on the day 
answering to the computation of the Gauls. 

How are we to believe, after these thy " sornettes," that in 
585 began the kingdom of the Mercians, whose first king was 
Credda — albeit is it very likely that the Mercian kingdom did 
in that year so begin, and that its first king was Credda ? 
How are we to believe the charming story of Saint Augustine 
and the little Angels in the Roman slave-market — and of the 
conversion of King Athelbert and his people to the true faith: 
a story all of us, I think, would be sorry to disbelieve, were 
it not for a terribly long story — showing how Pope Gregory 
delivered the soul of the Emperor Trajan from the pains of 
hell, five hundred years and more after his decease ; Saint 
Peter himself condescending to inform Gregory that in con- 
sequence of Trajan's handsome conduct to a certain widow 
during his lifetime, his soul though placed in flames did not 
feel the torments thereof ? 

But Roger is incorrigible. In 606, " Sabinian sat in the 
Roman chair one year, five months, and five days." Very 
plain, very credible, very matter-of-fact this ; but mark what 
follows. At this time a certain poor man asking alms of some 
sailors, and they refusing, the master of the vessel alleging 
"We have nothing here but stones," the poor man then 
replied, " Let, then, all you have be turned into stones." 
This was no sooner said than whatever there was in the ship 
that was eatable was turned into stones, retaining yet its 
former colour and shape ; but as uncookable and innutritious 
as granite pavement. 

I will skip two hundred and more annals, filled with accounts 
of transactions we have been taught to acknowledge and recog- 
nise as authentic English history. I come to that Saxon 
King, of whom every man with English blood in his veins is 
so proud — the King who has been glorified in poetry, and 
history, and painting, by thousands of voices and pens and 
pencils for a thousand years. I come to Alfred the Great. 
Roger tells us, without bombast or exaggeration, of Alfred's 
wisdom, learning, bravery, and benevolence ; of how he heard 
from his teacher, that an illiterate king is no better than a 
crowned ass ; and incited, moreover, by the desire of giving 
pleasure to his mother (ambition sweeter than any longing for 



444 ROGER THE MONK. 

double first class or stony, thorny Senior Wranglership), learnt, 
while at a tender age, a book of Saxon poetry, quite by heart. 
Of how he " set in order the affairs of his kingdom, exercised 
every sportsman-like art, instructed his goldsmiths and arti- 
ficers, his falconers and hawkers ; by his wisdom constructed 
buildings, venerable and noble beyond anything that had been 
attempted by his predecessors ; was careful to hear mass daily 
at stated hours, and loved psalms, and prayers, and alms- 
giving." Of how he waged fierce and laborious wars with the 
Pagans ; of how he was brought very low indeed by Hinguar 
and Halden, took refuge in a swineherd's cottage, lived in 
disguise and poverty, burnt the cakes, and was rated by the 
swineherd's wife ; of how he overcame his enemies, became a 
mighty sovereign, invented the wax-candle horologes, hung up 
golden bracelets in the highway, founded monasteries, died on 
the 23rd day of October in the fifth indiction, a.d. 900, and 
was buried at Winchester; — "clad," says Roger, piously, "in 
a robe of blessed immortality, and waiting to be crowned anew 
at the general resurrection." These are flowers, indeed: if 
Roger always wrote like this, we should revere him as the 
most conscientious of historians ; but why will he tell us an 
abominable fable, in the very midst of King Alfred's life, of 
the Emperor Charlemagne's having a clue tied to his thumb, 
by which he was led into purgatory by a shiny personage, 
supposed to be an angel ; " into deep and fiery valleys full of 
pits burning with pitch and sulphur, lead, wax, and tallow ; " 
of Charlemagne there seeing the ghosts of his fathers and his 
uncles ; and of his convoking the bishops and nobles of his 
kingdom in solemn conclave, and relating this preposterous 
vision to them ? We begin to entertain doubts about King 
Alfred, burnt cakes, vanquished Danes, and golden bracelets 
immediately. Two spirits would seem to have sat beside 
Roger while he penned his chronicles. One was the angel of 
truth, the other the father of lies, and their amalgamation is 
confusion. 

From King Alfred to Cnute, King of England and Den- 
mark, whom we more familiarly know in our English histories 
as Canute the Great, we have the story of the wars between 
King Cnute and the Saxon King Eadmund, of their doughty 
conflict, hand to hand, and of their ultimate compact and 



EOGER THE MONK. 445 

division of 1 the kingdom. We are told King Cmite made a 
pilgrimage to Rome, and promised the Pope that the tribute 
of- Saint Peter's penny, called in England " Romescot," 
together with the "chiriesat," or first-fruits of sheaves should, 
in future, be faithfully paid. Roger relates further, how 
Cnute overcame Malcolm King of Scots, and rebuked his 
(Cnute's) courtiers, on the occasion of the high tide, and how 
he would never, through humility, wear the crown afterwards. 
All this is very pretty and very historical ; nor do I see any 
reason to doubt Earl Godwin's treason, or Harold's coronation, 
or young Alfred's death and burial, of which Roger tells us 
subsequently. 

Next we have Hardicanute crowned, and Gunilda, his 
sister, married to Henry, the Roman Emperor. " The same 
emperor, in the lifetime of his father, Conrad, had received 
from a certain clerk a silver pipe " on condition that, when 
he became emperor, he would confer on him a bishopric ; 
which Henry, on succeeding to the crown, duly did. That 
falling ill, afterwards, he was beset by demons, who assailed 
him and shot into his face flames of fire through this notable 
pipe, burning his whole body inwardly and outwardly. " But, 
in the midst of these intolerable flames, the said emperor had 
with him a young man, holding in his hands a golden cup of 
extraordinary size filled with water, by whose assiduity in 
sprinkling the water, the violence of the heat was ex- 
tinguished ; and, while the emperor was wondering who the 
youth could be, a voice from Heaven said to him, ' Recal to 
memory the monastery of the blessed martyr Lawrence, on 
whose shrine thou conferredst a golden cup; wherefore know, 
for a certainty, that that youth is the blessed Saint Lawrence, 
who, in requital, gave thee space for repentance, and refreshed 
thee in thy torments.' " 

The Norman Conquest, the life and death of William 
Rufus, the Crusades, are all narrated by Roger de Wendover; 
but he does not grow veracious as the transactions he relates 
grow more modern. He lies fast and furiously, consistently, 
unblushingly, till miracles, ghosts, falling stars, bloody 
comets, headless men, talking beasts, singing birds, and 
dancing fishes are so mixed up with battles, sieges, charters, 
and chronology, that the brain becomes giddy, the eye weary. 



44 G ROGER THE MONK. 

Verily Roger the Monk hath made my heart heavy. Is 
the earth square or round, or three-cornered ? Is there an 
authentic History of England ? "What am I to believe ? 
Where is truth ? 

Truth purest and most refulgent of the feathers in angels' 
wings ; jewel beyond price and value — that thou art at the 
bottom of the well who can doubt ? Yet, often and often, does 
the bucket sent fifty fathoms deep after thee come, after much 
tangling and straining of cordage, up to the surface, and lo ! 
we have some lying pebble blinking in our faces, while thou, 
Truth, yet liest deep in the pellucid water. Old Roger may 
have sought for truth. I hope he did. I trust he did, but I 
am afraid he lost his way ever so many times during his 
search for it. 

Yet, what should we all be without Faith ? which comfort- 
ing, makes all things clear in one greater mystery, when 
history contends with marvel. And perhaps Roger the Monk, 
simple-minded old friar, in his strong belief, and faith, and 
trust, grew credulous, and in things temporal forgot to dis- 
criminate, and was afraid to rob one saint or martyr of one 
miracle or marvel with which ignorance and superstition had 
invested him — thinking that disrespect to a saint was dis- 
respect to the Master of them all. 



LILE JACK, 

THE DODDEEHAM WORTHY. 



CHAPTER I. 

There is a little, out of the way, north-country inn ; not 
only in the corner of a lane, but of a parish ; not only of a 
parish, but of a county ; not only of a county, but of England. 
Sheltered by tall old trees that talk soughfully among them- 
selves, in the summer breeze, of the days gone by, the Travis 
Arms is not without resemblance to some gray moss-clad old 
stone in a forest, that has been a trysting-place for courters and 
a resting-place for weary woodcutters for ages. Gray is this old 
inn and with verdure clad. The old oaks know it, and the old 
ravens ; for it has been contemporary with the hoariest patri- 
archs among trees and birds. And yet it has a greater claim 
to antiquity in the fact, that it has been an inn and the Travis 
Arms ever since the grand old family of Travis (and Heaven, 
and Norroy king-at-arms, only know how many years before 
the flood the heirs of Travis were belted knights) have held 
their own in Rocksavage Park, hard-by. 

The Travises are astonishingly old. Their woods might be 
(they look so old) almost primeval. Their ancient manor 
house is crumbling to pieces. Their servants are gray-beards. 
They are of the old fallen faith (the Protestant peasantry 
round about call them Papes), and bury their dead in an old 
vault beneath the gray ruins of Saint Severin's Abbey, within 
the demense of Rocksavage itself. The vault is so old, and 
ruinous, and gray : so full of sculptured, crumbling, vene- 
rable, noble age : that death loses half its newness and 
noisomeness there, and the pilgrim comes to look upon it less 
as a grave, than as a musty, worm-eaten volume of heraldry. 
Foul shame and sorest pity would it be if the Travis Arms, 



448 LILE JACK. 

and the Travises of Rocksavage, "were ever to be removed 
from the place of their long abidement ; and goodness grant 
that there may be no truth in the report that young Sir Bevis 
Tracy, the present Lord of Rocksavage, is in pecuniary diffi- 
culties, and is thinking of selling his estates ! 

I have been riding from Dodderham town to Rocksavage, 
ten miles, this golden afternoon. Wishing to be merciful to 
my beast I deliver him at the door of the Travis Arms unto 
an ancient ostler who might from his looks have groomed 
Bucephalus. Wishing to be consistent, and therefore mer- 
ciful to myself also, I enter the keeping-room of the inn, to 
bestow upon myself some victuals and drink. 

I find little in the keeping-room, however, save sand, 
silence, and some wonderful oil-paintings — master and date 
unknown ; subjects doubtful — one representing a person ap- 
parently following agricultural pursuits, with a woman (pro- 
bably his wife) on a porter's-knot behind him, who is driving 
a bargain (as it would seem) with a shiny black man with 
horns, hoofs, and a tail, about whose being the Evil One there 
can be no doubt at all. The fiend holds out a long purse of 
money and points exultingly to a neighbouring mile-stone on 
which is inscribed " IX miles to Garstaing," which puzzles 
me. So, wishing for company, explanation, and most of all 
refreshment, I move, carry unanimously, and execute, an 
immediate adjournment from the keeping-room to the kitchen 
of the Travis Arms. 

I am speedily made quite at home, and am sitting in 
the chimney-corner of the inn, for, although it is summer, 
and there is no fire, the chimney is the only legitimate 
corner to sit in in such an inn. I wish to be Mr. George 
Cattermole, Mr. Louis Haghe, or some other skilful delineator 
of old interiors ; immediately, though vainly, I strive to fix in 
my mind the yawning old cavernous chimney, with its Dutch- 
tiled sides, the lumbering mantel tumbling forward into the 
room ; the great boiling- pot of state suspended over the 
hearth, by a chain and hook ; the armoury of bright polished 
culinary weapons ; the store of hams and bacon-sides, and 
dried salmon hanging up; the cratch above my head — which 
said cratch, I beg to state, for the benefit of my southern 
readers, consists of a frame of thin iron bars, something like 



LILE JACK. 449 

a monster gridiron without a handle, which hangs about a 
foot from the ceiling, and supports the last baking of oat-bread, 
or girdle-cakes, such as are called bannocks by the Scotch ; 
the heavy beams ; the staring ballads on the walls ; the 
quaint clock ; the tiled sanded floor ; the bunches of sweet- 
herbs perched on shelves and hooks ; the dazzlingly clean 
deal tables and clumsy settles ; the iron dish of tobacco in 
lieu of screws ; the long pipes, smock-frocks, leggings, wea- 
ther-beaten faces, and tall brown drinking jugs of the 
company who are mostly of the earth (as connected with 
farming) earthy, and who have dropped in to " tak' a 
mouggo' yilL" Said "niougg" or mug, being understood to 
mean one of the full brown jugs replenished with home- 
brewed browner ale any number of times. 

When I have partaken of the clean simple fare which the 
Travis Arms can afford me, and which is set before me by a 
very neat-handed Phillis — so neat-handed, so smart, so attired 
after the latest Gazettes of fashion, that I am almost disap- 
pointed and wish she were older, and older-fashioned, I fill 
my pipe from the iron-dish, and fall to listening ; an accom- 
plishment which I flatter myself I am rather a proficient in, 
and on which I have received some pretty compliments in my 
time. I hear all about the crops, the latest markets, fights 
and fairs, and the very latest bulletins of the health of all the 
horses, dogs, and horned cattle in the neighbourhood. More 
than this, I hear some old country anecdotes, and old 
country stories of the North-country celebrities, contem- 
porary and departed ; and among these I become acquainted, 
for the first time, with the memorabilia bearing on Lile 
Jack. 

Who, Lile Jack, shall be my theme for a few lines. You 
must not expect much from him, ladies and gentlemen. Lile 
Jack killed no giants, rescued no distressed damsels, fought no 
battles. He was never even once in London in his life. He 
was a plain man, who spoke the North-country dialect, and 
very broadly too, but, he was an honest man was Lile Jack, a 
true Northern worthy. And when I remember that pleasant 
Master Thomas Fuller, the great biographer of worthies, did 
not disdain oft-times to sit in ingle-neuks, and gossip with 
rustic crones, endeavouring to elicit information relative to the 



450 LILE JACK. 

brave good men gone to their reward ; you will bear with me, 
I hope, if I make Lile Jack my hero. 

Lile Jack was simply an auctioneer, upholsterer, broker, 
and appraiser in Dodderham town. He had a great rambling 
house and shop crammed with the most heterogeneous mis- 
cellany of furniture imaginable. There was a four-post bed- 
stead in the parlour, and carved oak sideboards in the kitchen, 
which were used as dressers ; and in the best bed-room there 
was a huge billiard -table, taken to pieces and stowed away, 
as if a miniature slate quarry had lost its way, and accommo- 
dating itself to indoor life, had assumed a decent suit of green 
baize. There were chests of books which Lile Jack never 
read, for reading was not his forte, and a scarlet leather- 
covered Bible was his chief study ; there were chairs without 
number, and busts cheek by jowl with agricultural implements, 
for Lile Jack bought all sorts of things and sold most. 

It is upon the face of the case to state that he was called 
Jack because he had been christened John ; but the origin of 
the prefix of Lile is not quite so clear. In Dodderham par- 
lance Lile might mean a variety of things. Dodderham talked 
of a lile dog, a lile day, a lile book, a lile bairn. Lile was 
generally understood, however, to mean anything that every- 
body was attached to ; and as John Scotforth, the auctioneer, 
was beloved by the whole of Dodderham town, it may be 
deduced therefrom that he was in consequence called Lile Jack. 

The title, moreover, may have originally been attached to 
his name, as there were a great many more Jacks in Dodder- 
ham town. There was Slape Jack, the exciseman ; Wiggy 
Jack, the postmaster; Pug Jack, the draper; and Brandy 
Jack, who had been a schoolmaster, and a sailor, and a " me- 
thody parson," and was now nothing particular; so as Lile 
Jack, John Scotforth was easily distinguished, and was so 
known to the end of his days. 

My principal informant as to this worthy's history gave me 
his general character in a very few and simple words. " He 
was a Lile man," he said, " and niver spak ane wurd looder 
than anither, and trod his shoes as straight as an arrow. " 
Evenness of declamation, and regularity of pedal movement 
may have had something to do with Jack's lileness. 

In the great rambling house up-street, and its dependencies, 



LILE JACK. 451 

Jack kept, besides the furniture, quite an aviary of singing- 
birds; a spacious court of fowls, turkeys, magpies, ravens, 
and starlings ; several tame rabbits, and numerous dogs. As 
they were all well fed, and had all tempers of their own, and 
all adored Lile Jack, the noise they made at dinner, on the 
return of their master, or on any odd occasion that turned up, 
was rather confusing, not to say deafening. I need scarcely 
add, I think, that Lile Jack was a bachelor. 

But Lile Jack kept other things besides fowls, hens, rabbits, 
and dogs. He kept a prodigiously old grandmother, who 
surrounded herself every morning with a perfect spider's web 
of worsted and knitting needles, and passed the major part of 
the day in endeavours to knit herself out of her toils. The 
number of pairs of stockings that resulted from these combi- 
nations was so great that if they had all been put into imme- 
diate wear, instead of being comfortably entombed as soon as 
made in a dusty family vault a-top of the bed tester, would 
have sufficed for a township of centipedes, to the great injury 
of the trade and commerce of Nottingham. He kept a pale- 
faced niece, tall, and woefully marked with the small-pox, 
who had difficulties connected with her legs, and was fre- 
quently belated in wash-houses, and "fit to drop" over 
puddings. He kept an ancient man in a smock-frock, who 
was nearly a hundred years of age, past all work, hearing, 
sight, and almost speech, — and who could do little save crouch 
by the fire-side with a short pipe in his toothless mouth, or 
potter about in the stable with a venerable white horse, com- 
paratively as old and quite as blind, as feeble, as past work, 
as he was. The old man was called Daddy, the horse was 
called Snowball ; Lile Jack sternly repudiated the slightest 
suggestion as to the termination of the useless old horse's 
career by the bullet or poleaxe, and more sternly still the hint 
that the parish might charge itself with the keep of Daddy. 
' ' Baith ha' served me and mine, i' th' winter wark and sum- 
mer, years an' years, and baith shall bite and sup, and bide 
wi' me till a' th' wark be ower — be 't wi' them, or be 't wi' 
Jack Scotforth." 

So, with his old grandmother, niece, old servitors, both 
dumb and human, did Lile Jack continue to dwell. He was 
reputed to be a rich man ; but those who reckoned up his 

G G 2 



5, 



452 LILE JACK. 

"snougg hundreds" on their fingers, little knew what a pri- 
vate relieving-ofncer Lile Jack was ; what an amount of out- 
door relief he dispensed in secret ; how many unrecorded 
quartern loaves, sides of bacon, blankets, and half-crowns, 
were distributed by him, without the board of guardians o 
the ratepayers knowing anything of the matter. He mi 
have been worth many, many more hundreds of pounds if h 
had not given away so many, many hundreds of coals. 

Jack wore a very broad-brimmed white hat, on the crown 
of which he frequently made calculations in pencil, and which 
he considerably damaged in the excitement of his eloquence 
in the auctioneer's rostrum. He wore very large spectacles 
with thick tortoiseshell rims, and carried a stout oak sapling 
— a portentous staff with a bull-dog's head carved at the top. 
He wore paddock shoes : with which last item you must be 
content without further explanation, for my informant is three 
hundred miles away, and it is not probable that I shall ever 
see him again, and I have not the least idea what paddock 
shoes are. Still he wore them, and perhaps they may have 
assisted him in attaining that straightness of gait by whic 
he is yet affectionately remembered. 

Jack talked to himself as he walked. He would stop in 
the middle of the street, and walk round posts, or swing his 
stick violently, and sometimes take his hat off, and rumple his 
gray hair. He snuffed so much, and, when he smoked, 
inhaled and exhaled the tobacco fumes so fast, that it was 
difficult to divest yourself of the idea that Lile Jack was on 
fire, and that flames would burst from him presently. He was 
no spirit-drinker, but his consumption of ale was prodigious. 
"Gi's soummat quick," he would say, " soummats that's 
gat yist — life — in't. Ise nit drink yer brandy slugs, an 
dobbins o' gin, an' squibs o' rum ; gi' me what's quick, an 
measure me a gill o' yill. Friday's, Maggie !" It should be 
known that "Friday's," so called from brewing-day, was an 
ale of a potency and quickness which gave great satisfaction 
to Lile Jack, and brought great fame and custom to Maggie 
Sharp, landlady of the Cross Keys in Dodderham town. 

Jack had other eccentricities — some, in the artificial state 
of society which prevails even in a quiet town like Dodderham, 
rather inconvenient. He would tell the truth, and speak his 



3k 
ve 

is 
is 






LILE JACK. 453 

mind. If he saw, or was in company for the first time with, 
an individual whose demeanour or conversation did not please 
him, he told him so at once. " Thee 's gude for nowt," was 
his ordinary remark; "git out wi' thee." And as Jack's 
dictum in all houses of entertainment in Dodderham town was 
law, the sooner the unfortunate person accused of being gude 
for nowt, got out with him, the better. 

Taking his goodness of heart as an extenuation, freedoms 
of speech in Lile Jack were tolerated, when in other less 
favoured persons they would have been indignantly avenged. 
Thus when, one evening, Lile Jack sat smoking in the bar- 
parlour of the Cross Keys, with Maggie Sharp, then a very 
young and comely widow, on one side, and young Gafferson, the 
farmer of Cattenmere Fells on the other, and suddenly cried 
out, " Tom, wha dost thee not ask Maggie to wed ? " Maggie 
only smiled, blushed, bridled, simpered, and cried " Mercy on 
us, Mr. Scotforth ! " and young Tom Gafferson only laughed 
outright (he blushed a little, too), smote his stalwart thigh, 
and stammered " Maggie's ne'er thowt of weddin', I'se 
warrant ! " If any other person had made such a remark, 
Maggie would have quitted the room indignantly, and there 
would have been tiling of doors, and hammering of heads for 
sure. But, bolder still, when Jack arose, and taking Maggie 
round the waist, and chucking her under the chin, deliberately 
led her to Tom Gafferson, and thrust her into that yeoman's 
arms, saying, " Gang till him, lass, gang till him, Ifizzie. 
Thee '11 mak a hundred a year till her, Tom, I know thou 
will — " what would have been the consequence if anybody 
else had taken such a liberty ? Blood at least. Yet Maggie 
Sharp and Tom Gafferson could forgive anything in Mr. 
Scotforth. They forgave him so completely indeed, that they 
were married six weeks afterwards, and at a certain event 
thereafter ensuing, solicited Jack (for about the five hundredth 
time in his life) to stand godfather. 

Thus merrily, charitably, through a peaceful, useful life, 
Lile Jack went down towards an honourable grave. He 
heaped not up riches, knowing not who should gather them ; 
he gave not according to his means, but according to the want 
of means of the poor and lowly. He was a Lile man, and 
his purse was as open as his heart. 



454 LILE JACK. 



CHAPTER II. 

THE COMPASSIONATE BROKER. 



irily 
ugh 

ten- 



Haed lines — stern and grim avocations — do not necessarily 
make hard men. On the contrary, it would seem as though 
the constant contemplation of pain and suffering had a 
clency to soften rather than indurate the heart of the beholder. 
Butchers are not always sanguinary, but are ordinarily tender- 
hearted men. Grisly soldiers and sailors are gentle and lamb- 
like with children. Burly dustmen and coalheavers are, save 
when excited with the furor of alcohol, men of a meek and 
peaceable demeanour. Turnkeys and gaolers, generally, are 
mild and benign men, full of quiet suggestions for the 
prisoner's comforts. The majority of prize-fighters are slow 
to take offence, and loth to use their terrible weapons. In- 
deed, with the exception of relieving-officers, slave-dealers, 
plaintiffs' -attorneys, some schoolmasters, bill-discounters, and 
secretaries of loan societies, it is rare to find men who at all 
partake of the hardness of the callings they are compelled to 
follow. Much belied as this poor human nature is, those who 
delight in the infliction of pain, and the spectacle of misery, 
for their own sakes, are very very few. Nero, Governor Wall, 
and Mrs. Brownrigg, are yet monsters. 

Xow of all hardest, stoniest, sternest lines a man can well 
follow, commend me to that of an auctioneer, broker, and 
appraiser. To be a George Robins, a Musgrove and Gadsden, 
a Cafe, Sons, and Reed, must be hard enough to a man of 
sensitive feelings. To have to sell the broad green acres that 
have been in the good old family for generations and genera- 
tions, to have to build one's auctioneering nest in the scathed 
branches of the old mahogany tree, and knock down, one by 
one, the withered blossoms of friendship and hospitality, and 
love ; to see the Turkey carpets rolled up, and the pictures 
turned with their faces to the wall ; to value the goblets that 
have held a thousand loving pledges, and the heir-looms that 
have been won by wisdom and bravery, only as so much metal, 
at so much per ounce ; to solicit an advance on the marriage 
bed, and turn up the grandsire's arm-chair, that a Hebrew 






LILE JACK. 455 

upholsterer, from Finsbury Pavement, may inspect its castors ; 
to hammer the pearls out of the coronet, and draw the bar- 
sinister of poverty across the time-hononred scutcheon ; to 
draw up the death-warrant of the pride, and wealth, and com- 
fort of a family in a catalogue — reckoning the choicest house- 
hold treasures, the Lares and Penates of the hearth ; the old 
lord's velvet crutch, the heir's cricket bat, when he was a boy, 
the heiress's bird-cage, only as so many lots — all this must be 
har4 and cruel enough ; and as the auctioneer's hammer in 
its verberations seems but to punctuate the text that Favour is 
deceitful and beauty vain, and that there is no profit under 
the sun, the auctioneer himself must sigh. 

But when, as is generally the case in the provinces, the 
auctioneer is also a broker and valuer, when he seizes as well 
as sells ; when he is not only favoured with instructions to sell, 
but commanded, with her Majesty's greeting, to impound 
under the sheriff's levy, the vocation becomes doubly painful, 
doubly melancholy. The auctioneer becomes the undertaker 
of the family happiness, and with his hammer nails up the 
coffin of their hopes. He comes, not of himself, but by the 
law, to strip the widow and the orphan, and despoil the 
fatherless. The bed is his, the ticking clock, the little old 
miniature on the mantel, the few books on the hanging shelf, 
the bright pots and pans, the father's gun, the children's little 
go-cart. - He can take the hearth-rug from under the cat, and 
though that domestic animal herself is beneath his notice, if 
she had a brass collar it would be Ms, and down as an item 
in the inventory in a moment. To seize the poor man's sticks 
is utterly to beggar and crush him, to scrape him as clean as 
a forked radish, to knock the poor edifice of his prosperity as 
completely about his ears, as the housemaid's broom de- 
molishes the spider's web ; aye, but without having the power 
to re-construct his web, as the spider can. But though hard, 
it is the law, and the law must be obeyed ; and we must do 
our duty, as Lile Jack Scotforth of Dodderham said. 

Lile Jack had sold up some hundreds of families in his 
time. He, a man of toast and butter, a man with a heart so 
soft and big and porous, that it was continually sucking up 
milk and honey, and continually being squeezed by the fingers 
of sympathy for the benefit of those about him, and continually 



456 LILE JACK. 

ready to imbibe, and be squeezed again — lie had been in pos- 
session times out of number. He, who not only prayed for 
bis daily bread, but shared it with his hungry neighbour, was 
the almost daily exponent of the writ of Fi. fa. Each distress 
he put in, was a distress to him ; inventories were so many 
penitential psalms to him; but what was to be done? If 
landlords wouldn't wait, the law, so hasty in taking, so tardy 
in restoring, could not afford to wait a moment either, you 
may be sure, and " if you cannot get meal you mun tak' malt, 
an' sell the creeturs up," said Lile Jack with a sigh. 

Auctioneering, among the middle classes, the good man 
took to more kindly. Among the peculiarities of Dodderham 
folk is a strong predilection for attending sales, and bidding 
for articles thereat. Little Miss Ogle, the confectioner, has 
quite a museum of articles she has picked up at sales — Chinese 
slippers, boxes of cigars, harness, gas-fittings, and other mis- 
cellaneous articles, all of which she has acquired from time to 
time, without the slighest definite idea of their being any use 
to her, but with a vague notion that they may turn up handy 
some day. Mrs. Squatto, Captain Squatto's widow, who is 
seventy-eight, and very nearly blind, has quite a bibliomania 
for book-purchasing, whether through a pure Roxburghian 
love of learning, or through a desire for outbidding the Misses 
Spackthorn, who conduct the young ladies' seminary in Danes' 
Gate, has not been stated. Old Puckfist, the druggist, bought 
an extensive consignment of slates at Jerry Morson's sale last 
year, knocked his doors and stair- walls half to pieces in bring- 
ing them home, and has never made any use of them since. 
Miss Reek, the milliner, who is an inveterate sale-frequenter, 
positively outbid Puckfist on the same occasion, and had 
knocked down to her a hideous figure of a river god, in Roman 
cement, which was wont to stand in Jerry Morson's garden, 
with a neat bordering of oyster-shells, bits of painted coal, 
and moss, like parsley round cold meat, surrounding it. She 
never had the courage to remove it, or sell it, or do anything 
with it : and it stands to this day in Hodder the plasterer's 
yard, a dreary battered old object, with a broken nose, and 
a portrait of Latherum, the national- school-master, vilely 
drawn in red chalk on its pedestal. I think, were it not so 
heavy, the boys would have it for a Guy, next fifth of Novem- 



LILE JACK. 457 

ber ; yet, I dare say, Miss Reek, in common with Miss Ogle, 
still cherishes the idea that it will eventually turn up handy. 
As so many Dodderham folk are so fond of buying, it may 
readily be imagined that a considerable number are as addicted 
to selling their goods through the .same channel. Thus you 
will scarcely meet a Dodderham burgess, or small annuitant, 
but talks of his sale, his father's sale, aunt's sale, or brother- 
in-law's sale. A marriage, a death, a removal, a family 
quarrel, a rise or a fall in fortune, are all so many incentives 
to the Dodderham people to call in the auctioneer and have a 
sale ; and you may believe that popular as Lile Jack was in 
his lifetime, he was very frequently indeed favoured with 
instructions to sell without reserve. 

Jack's delight was in selling inns and public-houses, by 
auction. He was, as I have already hinted, a humourist ; and 
with much north-country jocoseness, would he expatiate on 
the neat wines and genuine spirits, the comfortable beds, 
commodious, commercial and show rooms, clean stabling, con- 
venient eating parlours, roomy bar, ancient lineage, and 
excellent connection of the establishments he offered for public 
competition. Jack's cracks, or witticisms in the rostrum, 
grew to be famous all over the country-side ; sly, personal 
satire (genial and good-humoured, however), mingled with 
his professional facetiousness, and it grew at last quite common 
for one burgess to meet another in the market-place on the 
morning of a sale, and say, " Ise gangin up street t'heer Lile 
Jack trot fouk, will't come ? " " Trot" is Dodderham for the 
familiar London chaff. 

The great Squire Rigg, of Regans' s Manor — the Lord of 
Regans — as with a remnant of feudal reverence he was still 
called by the peasantry, was a frequent attendant at Lile Jack's 
sales, and it was he who started, and so liberally subscribed to 
the fund for presenting Jack with the bonny silver hammer, 
which he flourished with so much honest pride for so many 
years. The Lord of Regans put the hammer into the 
auctioneer's hand himself, after a dinner at John Quitt's, the 
Royal Oak hotel ; with a speech. I will not say the Squire's 
speech was bad, because Lile Jack's oratory in reply was 
infinitely worse, not to say choky. I know that there were a 
good many healths drunk that night, and much laughter and 



i5 8 LILE JACK. 

good fellowship, and that the auctioneer coming home that 
night could only ejaculate to his household, in very thick and 
incoherent accents — " T'Lord O'Regans, th' horn Lord 
O'Regans. A silver hammer. Jack thee's lile, thee's lile ! " 
with which pardonable expression of vanity he fell, and they 
put him to bed. 

But, as has already been noticed in this performance, there 
were dark sides in Jack's professional career, and Jack's ham- 
mer was of coffin-elm as well as silver. It became his duty, in 
the way of business, to sell up the Widow Webb. Mrs. 
Webb was a poor hard-working body, whose husband, a rachitic 
tailor, had lived, and worked, and died in extreme poverty. 
The lone woman, on his decease, took to waistcoat-making as 
a livelihood, but her earnings were very small, and the times 
were very hard. She had a grown-up daughter who turned 
her mother's joy to sorrow, and coming in beauty, and health, 
and innocence, departed in darkness, so that she was covered 
with it and with shame. This help-meet rudely severed, the 
Widow Webb still kept patiently and cheerfully upon her 
stony way, rearing up her two young children, one of whom 
was a mere baby, a girl, — the other a feeble, flaxen-haired, 
pale-farced child, five years old, by name Obadiah. They 
called him Oby. The forlorn mother struggled on and on 
against poverty as a doctor will struggle against a hopeless 
cancer, or a besieged general without arms or provisions, and 
almost without men, will defend a fortress against a powerful, 
persevering assailant. But no relief came, and the citadel 
was stormed at last. The widow had the misfortune to sit 
under a hard landlord. Gregson, the tea-dealer, surnamed 
Smell o' Brass ; which sobriquet he had acquired through a 
colloquy with another burgess, who, expressing an opinion 
that he, Gregson, must "have a power o' brass," the tea- 
dealer answered, " Brass ! I fairly smell o' brass ! " Mrs. 
Webb grew in arrear with her rent, and could not pay, and 
Smell o' Brass was implacable, and instructed Lile Jack to sell 
her up. 

Our friend went down the street towards the widow's 
humble dwelling in a very unusual state of perturbation. 
The white hat with the calculations on the crown was con- 
stantly off his head, and brought into rude collision with 



LILE JACK. 459 

posts and barrows. The quantities of snuff he took were 
enormous, and his mutterings prodigious. He had sent a 
man before him as an avant- courier of evil — a man whose 
boots were hideous on the pavement as he brought bad 
tidings ; but he was sorely discomposed on reaching the 
widow's cottage to find little Oby at the door, who ran to 
embrace his knees, and hailed him affectionately as " mon." 
Oby was a great ally and favourite of Lile Jack, and would 
frequently toddle up to the auctioneer's shop, and cry out 
" Mon, com' out an' gi' Oby claggett " (which claggett is a 
description of hardbake), whereupon, if Jack were not at 
home, the man that was nearly a hundred years of age would 
come out and talk toothlessly to Oby. 

The broker hurriedly patted the child on the head, and 
passed in. The catastrophe was out. The widow was sitting 
rocking herself in her chair, wringing her hands and crying 
bitterly. The baby, cast upon its own resources and upon the 
wide wide world, was lamenting its miseries with prophetic 
anticipation ; Tom Bagshaw, Lile Jack's assistant, had already 
commenced his inventory ; and Oby, seeing that grief was the 
order of the day, had taken to crying quietly over a waistcoat- 
piece. Under these circumstances there was nothing left for 
Lile Jack to do but to take more snuff, and ill-treat the long- 
suffering white hat worse than ever. 

" My poor father," cried the widow in her anguish, " oft 
said that th' prison or th' poor-house wor nit built that should 
hold yan o' his bairns. But I mun gang till baith — till baith, 
Mr. Scotforth, and th' lile bairns ; the creeter that canna walk 
nor speak, and Oby, so frile an' delicate. I'll never rise again, 
Mr. Scotforth, I'll never rise again." 

" It's hard to bear, my lass," quoth Lile Jack; " cruel hard 
to bear. But we a' ha' our burdens, and mun bear them. 
And yet," he added, despondingly, " there's auld Middlegate 
Mumping Wilson up at t' Bank, wi' mair goud than wad fill 
thy house, and Miss Sturk, t' mantymecker wi' hunderds, an 
Sangate Gregson, that smells o' brass, an yit nit a penny for 
thee." 

" If it war nit for t' bairns, I wad gang to service. I wad 
work i' th' crofts and fields, i' th' shippons and middens ; but 
can I leave these bonny creeturs ? " 



460 LILE JACK. 

" Puir body, puir body ! " murmured Lile Jack, doing the 
white hat a mortal injury. 

" Can I coin goud? Can I mak' siller oot o' barley-meal?" 
asked the widow, despairingly. 

" It's hard," quoth Lile Jack, wrenching a button off his 
waistcoat. " It's bitter hard," he continued, manifesting a 
strong desire to tear the brim of the white hat from the body. 
" It's domed hard ! " cried the compassionate broker, throwing 
the white hat into the fireplace. 

But the inventory was completed, and Jack had his business 
to do. He spoke the widow fair, and promised to exert his 
utmost influence with that hard man and tea-dealer, Smell o' 
Brass, with but very faint hopes in his own mind, however, of 
making any impression upon that auriferous person. He was 
about departing, and had beckoned Oby to him, with the 
intention of patting him upon the head, and slipping a sove- 
reign into his hand, when the child ran to him, and caught 
hold of his legs. 

" I'se gang yam wi' thee," he cried. " Lem-me gang yam 
wi' thee, thou lile mon." 

" Nay, nay, my bairn," answered Lile Jack, shaking his 
head kindly; "there's bigger bairns nor thee at yam that 
sup a' the parritch I can find meal for. Thee cannot come 
wi' me, Oby ! " 

" I'se gang yam wi' thee, I'se gang yam wi' thee," repeated 
the little boy, looking up imploringly, his blue eyes swimming 
with tears, into Lile Jack's face. 

The compassionate broker looked towards where the white 
hat was, as if to ask that ill-used article of apparel for advice. 
But the white hat was grovelling in the dust and ashes of the 
fire-place, as if in profound disgust at its maltreatment, and 
Lile Jack not being able to avail himself of its counsel, 
followed, instead, that of his own true heart. 

Lile Jack spoke, as he had promised, to the redoubtable 
Smell o' Brass. I fancy, however, that he spoke to him much 
as the gentleman with the illegible, but glorious and delightful 
signature, who is connected with the bank of England speaks 
to Mr. Matthew Marshall of that establishment. At all events, 
the widow's sticks were released, and she was enabled to 
resume her humble business. But she did not live long. 



LILE JACK. 461 

Worn out with sorrow, privation, hard work, and ill-health, 
she soon rejoined her harmless rachitic husband the tailor, 
and her weakly baby followed her soon afterwards. Then 
Oby was left an orphan indeed. 

An orphan ! No ! He went home with Lile Jack, and in 
the heterogeneous household of that good fellow, found a 
list of relatives as long as that in the Prayer-book, which 
enumerates the persons a man may not marry. The man that 
was nearly a hundred years old was a grandfather to him ; 
the pock-marked niece was his aunt ; and he found an uncle in 
the white horse, and cousins in the rabbits, and brothers-in- 
law in the starlings. In Lile Jack he found a whole conscription 
of fathers. 

The child grew up to be a thin, pale, tall, delicate lad. 
Lile Jack had him taught a plain decent education. " Latin 
an' Greek, and sic' like thirlygigs," he said, "were good for 
nowt i' th' warkin' warl'." When Oby came to be about 
twelve, he was bound prentice to Dick Heelband, the principal 
tailor in Dodderham, but he made such progress, and turned 
out to be so ingenious, active, industrious, docile a lad, that 
Lile Jack announced his intention of sending him to Lunnon, 
and making a gentleman of him. A great London auctioneer 
with whom Jack was in correspondence offered to take Obadiah 
into his counting-house for three years at a moderate premium, 
and the great squire Rigg, now one of the members for the 
county, told Lile Jack that he was an honest man (which 
from so great a squire, was commendation indeed) ; that he 
should take upon himself to pay the lad's premium, and the 
expense of cancelling his indentures with Heelband, and that 
Jack would have all the more to leave Oby when he died. 

The boy's ill-health, and the manifest disinclination of Lile 
Jack to part with a being whom he had grown to love as the 
apple of his eye, caused the journey to London to be deferred 
from six months to six months, and from year to year, till 
Oby was nearly eighteen years of age. At last Lile Jack 
made up his mind to part with his darling, and Oby with 
great difficulty reconciled himself to the necessity of a tempo- 
rary separation from his adopted father. The three years 
would soon be over, and then Oby would return full as a 
cratch with the wisdom of London town, and succeed Lile 



462 LILE JACK. 

Jack, who was beginning to get old, and fond of a pipe in the 
middle of the day, in the auctioneering business. A day was 
fixed for his departure, and a place taken for him in the 
Constitution coach. The pock-marked niece prepared him a 
huge chest of linen. Dick Heeiband turned out for him two 
suits of clothes, which, in the private opinion of Dick, and 
indeed of the whole of Dodderham folk to boot, would rather 
astonish the Londoners ; and Lile Jack solemnly presented 
him with a big silver watch — a watch that had kept time in 
auctions out of number — which went like a church clock, and 
made nearly as much noise as one in ticking. The day before 
that fixed for his journey, Oby went round to bid all the 
principal inhabitants of Dodderham a formal good-bye. His 
tour resembled in some degree that of the heraldic lion and 
unicorn, for some gave him white bread and some brown, 
and some plum-cake ; some gave him Bibles too, also Prayer- 
books, also jams and woollen comforters ; and little Miss Ogle 
presented him with a purse of bonny money, containing a 
Spanish doubloon, a William and Mary half-crown, and two 
silverpennies of George II. There was not one who did not 
give the gentle, affectionate lad their warmest wishes for 
health and success. 

Oby was to start by the night coach from Dodderham. It 
was winter, and Lile Jack and his protege sat by the fireside 
in the parlour of the Royal Oak, waiting for the mail. The 
lad's luggage was in the hall, all corded and directed. The 
parlour was full of Dodderham folk, over their pipes, all 
waiting to see Oby Webb off, and bid him God speed. 

Lile Jack had been smoking more, and snuffing more, and 
coughing more, and lacerating the person and feelings of the 
white hat — which was now a mere tawny wreck — more than 
usual that evening. He had talked with Oby about his plans, 
and how soon the three years would be over, and how happy 
they would all be when he returned to Dodderham town again, 
quite the gentleman. 

" Thee's gangin t' Lunnon, Oby ma lad," he concluded. 
"It's aye large, and wicked, and thee wilt meet wi' a mony 
rogues, and a mony fules, and a mony that's gude fur nowt : 
nay, nit to mak' bacca leets o' . But thou'rt a gude lad, and 
sure I am thou wilt do thy duty towowrds man an' fear God. 



LILE JACK. 463 

But dinna be fleeted, Oby. Open the lugs, an' cock up t' end 
o' thee ee ; and if ony speaks agin Dodderham toun or Dod- 
derham fouk, blare oot at 'em. Sprak oup at 'em like a brak' 
bowstring. I'se ge'en thee brass for thy meat, and brass for 
thy gear, and brass for thy shear ; an' here's that thou shall 
nit want for swaggerin' money, which thou wilt not brak 
into, unless to prevent a Dodderham lad lookin' like a fule." 
With which, Jack handed a leathern purse to his adopted 
child, containing five golden guineas. 

The Constitution coach drove up to the Royal Oak door 
about a quarter to eleven. The hostler handed up Oby's 
luggage ; and Spurrell the coachman entered the inn parlour 
for a glass of brandy. Spurrell was a lusty man with a 
scarlet face, and all eyes were immediately turned to that 
renowned white box-coat of his, in the breast pocket of which 
all men knew he carried the Dodderham Bank parcel, con- 
taining notes amounting to unnumbered thousands. 

One by one the guests arose, and shaking Oby cordially by 
the hand bade him farewell. Mrs. Quitt the landlady kissed 
him on both cheeks, and left a tear upon his woollen com- 
forter ; and Spurrell, the burly, and the scarlet-faced, looked 
on like an Anglo- Greek chorus who could moralise a great 
deal upon the leave-takings he had seen, if he chose. 

And now it was Lile Jack's turn. He led the lad into 
the middle of the room, and held him at arm's length by 
both hands, the lamp-light streaming over his working face. 

" Thou'rt goin' to Lunnon, Oby," he said, in a strange 
voice. " T' Lunnon to be a gentleman. An' — an' — " 

The rest of Lile Jack's speech must ever remain as great 
a secret as an unreported debate. It might have been a 
perfectly Ciceronian oration ; it might have been as incohe- 
rent an address as he made on the night of the presentation 
of the hammer. For, to use the words of my informant, 
he "brak doun soudden, an' cried out." Indeed, he fell 
upon the neck of the lad he loved so dearly, sobbing out, 
" My bairn, my bairn, my lile, lile bairn ! " 

"I'll nit gang t' Lunnon," sobbed, on his part, Oby. 
" I'll nit be a gentleman, nor mak' my fortune. For thou 
hast been Lunnon and gentlefolk, and fortune, and a' th' 
warl tu me, an' I will na leave thee ! " 



464 



LILE JACK. 



The Constitution coach went to London that night; but 
without Oby. He did not go next week, next month, next 
year ; he never went. If I were writing a romance I should 
dearly love to tell how Oby grew up strong, clever, and pros- 
perous, and in due time wedded one of the fair maids of Dod- 
derham. But alas ! this is but the story of a true hard world 
that I heard in a little country inn. The lad had been deli- 
cate from his cradle, and he died before he was twenty-two 
years of age. Lile Jack followed him to the grave, and the 
tears that fell upon his coffin pattered louder than the dust 
that the gravedigger sprinkled on it. 



BULLFKOG. 



I claim to be a free-born Briton. I have been told I am, 
so many times, by so many different persons, from so many 
platforms, newspaper columns, and honourable houses, to 
which honourable gentlemen come down on purpose to tell 
me that I am free and a Briton, that I have grown quite to 
believe in my freedom and my British birth. I believe in 
them implicitly and without reservation. 

I say, I am a free-born Briton, and I am proud of it. I 
pay my taxes — a few with pleasure, more with reluctance, 
some with grumbling and aversion ; but I do pay them all, 
somehow. I know that my house is my castle ; that the 
blackest bondsman landing on my shores becomes free ; that 
my representative system does (in a certain bungling manner) 
represent me, my wife and children, my wants and wishes ; 
that my ministers only hold office during good behaviour ; 
that my press is free as the air I breathe ; that the Queen 
cannot shut me out of her parks (even if she wished to do so, 
of any such intention of doing which I entirely acquit the 
illustrious lady) ; that the Woods and Forests cannot shut 
me out of Westminster Hall, nor the sheriffs out of the gallery 
of the Old Bailey, — at least that they cannot legally do so, though 
they do shut me out from time to time on the pretexts of half- 
crowns, interesting murder trials, &c. I know that I am 
legally free and independent ; that I have a legal guardian in 
the Lord Chancellor, and three legal nursing mothers in the 
Poor Law Commissioners ; that all in this great lies Publico, 
is done for me and by me — The People. 

It is because I know this, and have read and sung Rule 
Britannia, chorusing till I was hoarse that Britons never, never, 
never will be slaves, that I am determined not to submit to 
the tyranny of Bullfrog. Who is Bullfrog, I should like 
to know, that he is to dictate to me how I am to act and 

H H 



466 BULLFROG. 

speak and think ; whom I am to like and dislike ; what I am 
to read and write; what I am to eat, drink, and avoid; 
whom I am to recognise and whom to cut ? Who is Bull- 
frog, that he should stand at my elbow, a thousand times 
more exigent and obtrusive than Sancho's physician, and with 
his puny baton wave away the viands that I love, — nay, 
with even more insolence and pretension than the Baratarian 
practitioner, insist upon my gorging myself with meats of 
his selection — meats which my stomach rebels against and 
my soul abhors ? Is it because Bullfrog is related by the 
mother's side to the Bellows family, and is a distant con- 
nection of the Blowers, and the Puffs, and the Blatants ? 
Is it because he married Miss Hogg (of the Wholecombe 
family), that I am to pin my faith on Bullfrog, and reverence 
his dicta in all matters of taste as well as conduct, and accept 
him as my arbiter elegantiarum, — my guide, philosopher, and 
friend ? Am I to give up my convictions, to abandon my 
preconceived notions, to write myself down an ass, which is a 
hundred degrees worse than being written down one by some- 
body else? Am I to see through Bullfrog's spectacles; to 
ride behind him on his hobby-horse and a pillion ; to stand 
in his shoes; be fed with mind-pap from his spoon, and learn 
my ABC from his hornbook? No, not for a thousand Bull- 
frogs. 

It is my steadfast opinion that the British public are not 
only in danger of falling under the tyranny of Bullfrog, but 
that a considerable section of them are absolutely subject to 
his humiliating domination. Not believing in, or setting the 
slightest store by the opinions of Bullfrog, I am sensible that 
he has legions of dupes, admirers, and adherents. I deplore 
this. I consider Bullfrog to be a shallow, conceited, mis- 
chievous impostor, and I denounce him as such. I don't 
care about his being on visiting terms with Sir Fretful 
Plagiary, and having Dangle and Sneer at his elbow. I 
don't care for his kinsman Mr. Puff's tragedy in which the 
heroine goes mad in white satin and the confidante in white 
linen. I don't care for his having the " press under his 
thumb " (as he boasts); for his telling me " what they say at 
the clubs;" for his after-dinner speeches; for his platform 
speeches ; for his stage speeches; for his pulpit speeches ; for 



BULLFROG. 467 

his advertisements, placards, posters, slips, cards, circulars, 
and handbills. I won't believe in his coats, his hats, his 
cookery, his books, his patriotism, his pills, his tenrperarjce, 
his accomplishments as a linguist, his leaders, his travels I 
don't know how far beyond the Rocky Mountains, his aesthetic 
tragedies, his poetry (spasmodic or otherwise), his pictures, 
his lectures, his Shakespearean impersonations, his Seers (of 
Poughkeepsie or otherwise), his remedial measures, and his 
finality. I snap my fingers at the statistics which he vomits; 
I scorn his tables that turn, his cheffoniers that argue, and 
his music-stools that reason. Let him pass acts of parlia- 
ment, I will drive six-in-hand through {hem, till they are 
repealed. Let him croak, puff, blow, and swell as much as 
he pleases ; he will burst at last, and his marsh will know 
him no more. 

For Bullfrog would not be Bullfrog if he were not con- 
tinually emulating that emerited prototype of his in the fable, 
and straining till his eyes start out of his head, and the 
froggish blood out of his veins in a miserable attempt to 
attain the size and stature of the lordly bull above him. 
Whenever a great thing is done, a great principle recognised, 
a great man made manifest, forthwith up rises Bullfrog from 
the mud and the rushes ; forthwith he swells and swells and 
swells. He is ridiculous of course ; it would be well enough 
if he were only ridiculous ; but the worst of it is that the 
other frogs believe in him ; likewise the toads, and the 
tadpoles, and the newts : they all believe in him, and cry 
what a fine frog he is as they see him swell and hear him 
roar (for your Bullfrog can roar lustily) — till he bursts. 

When a few learned and pious men, possibly vain, perhaps 
mistaken, certainly enthusiastic, obviously disinterested, parted 
from the church that reared, and the schools of learning that 
nurtured them, then, from afar off, uprose Bullfrog, and 
swelled and roared. Bullfrog gave up no fat living: not he. 
Prebend he stuck to, and fellowship he held on to with pre- 
hensile tenacity ; but he parted his hair down the middle, and 
allowed it to grow down his back ; he left off wearing collars 
to his coat, collars to his shirt, and bows * to his neckcloth ; he 
fastened his waistcoat behind; abjured pomatum; shaved 
three times a day ; cut out a large cross in red cloth, and 



468 BULLFEOG. 



pasted it on his prayer-book ; and dated his letters Feast 
St. Puterpotte, Eve of St. Giles. He did not read the Fathers, 
but he quoted them. He dined upon parched peas twice a 
week, and was suspected of wearing vegetables of that descrip- 
tion in his patent leather boots. He did not condemn while 
mildly refraining from absolutely approving the wearing of, 
hair shirts, spiked girdles, and sackcloth drawers. He talked 
of lecterns, piscinae, pyxes, octaves, novenas, matins, vespers, 
and complins. He almost ruined himself in the purchase of 
flowers for the communion-table of his quiet, humble, little 
country church. He preached in a surplice, and put the ragged 
little boys of the village into surplices too, and made them 
chant drearily, to the great scandal of the white-headed 
organist and the parish clerk. He made more bows than a 
dancing-master, and went through more postures than an 
acrobat, in the solemn, simple Liturgy. He wrote foolish 
letters to his bishop, and foolish pamphlets for the benefit of 
his butterman. He shared, with lap-dogs, bearded music- 
masters, and quack-doctors, the capricious . admiration of 
wheezy dowagers and sentimental young ladies with long 
auburn ringlets. In short — what is curious, but perfectly 
reconcilable with the Bullfrog organisation — he made an ass 
of himself. 

Bullfrog's great cynosure — the bull — is remarkable for his 
obtuse perversity in running at a gate : it is all the same to 
Bull should the gate happen to be a railway one, with an 
express train passing in front of it, at the rate of sixty miles 
an hour. In a parity of perverseness the ecclesiastical Bull- 
frog endeavours to puff the poor twopenny wax taper, anent 
which, with its attendant candlestick, there is such a terrible 
pother between him and his bishop, into the dimensions of 
that famous candle which Latimer told good master Bidley 
should never be extinguished in England. But it will not do, 
Bullfrog. We know which is the twopenny taper and which 
the church candle. You may preach in a surplice, a shirt 
over your clothes, like a "Whiteboy, a smock-frock, a flour- 
sack, or a harlequin's jacket, if you like; you may make such 
reverences and gyrations before carved screens and ornamental 
brass-work as may warrant your being mistaken for my friend 
Saltimbanque tumbling over head and ears in the booth 



of 



BULLFROG. 469 

yonder; you may wear your hair parted in the middle, behind, 
before, or twisted into a tail, after the Chinese fashion ; you 
may mortify yourself with fasts, macerations, vigils, and 
disciplines, till you become as emaciated as Jean Baptiste 
Whats-his-name, the living skeleton (a dead skeleton now, I 
opine) ; you may publish whole libraries of controversial 
portmanteaus, bandboxes, and Cheshire cheese wrappers, but 
you shall not ride over me, Bullfrog. 

I am a free-born Briton (I think I observed that before) 
and I hate cant — which is Bullfrog. Also arrogance. Which 
is Bullfrog. Also the conceited puffery and exaggeration of 
ridiculous and offensive ceremonies into rules of faith and 
conduct. Bullfrog again. If I am to be a religious Briton, 
let me have by all means as much faith, hope, and charity, as 
possible; but don't tell me that there is any faith, or hope, or 
charity in the Reverend Bullfrog bribing the blackguard 
" little Froggees" to pelt his rivals — the billstickers — with 
rotten eggs, on a disputed question of churchwardens and 
candlesticks. 

You had better paint, Bullfrog. No free-born Briton in 
this favoured island would be happier than I would be to 
recognise and admire a good, a great picture from your pencil. 
And though I denounce you by times, as an imitator, I would 
in no case decry imitation in art where imitation is associated 
with study, with appreciation, with progress. Copy, follow, 
dwell upon those grand old masters of the Loggie and Stanze, 
whose footsteps echo through the corridors of Time. Pin your 
faith upon a Giotto or a Cimabue. Cry with Gainsborough 
that you are going to heaven, and that Vandyke is of the 
company; paraphrase Erasmus, and say, " Sancte Eafaelle, 
orate pro nobis;" be a disciple, and a passionate one, of the 
colourists of Venice, the draughtsmen of Florence, and the 
thinkers of Rome. Do this, Bullfrog, and I will immediately 
change my name from Muggins to Maecenas, and give you 
commissions for canvases fifty feet by twenty, the painting of 
which shall last you life long, and make you a millionnaire. 
But you can't do it, Bullfrog. Here are two or three good 
and true young men. Scholars, enthusiasts, thinkers ; inde- 
fatigable in study, triumphant in performance. They paint 
pictures in which the subtle delicacy of thought and poetical 



470 BULLFROG-. 

feeling, amis itself against the world in the chain -mail of 
reality. Because these painters depict with minute fidelity 
the minutest accessories to the story they tell ; because they 
conquer the manipulated representation of the mortar between 
the bricks, the reticulations of the leaves, the bloom on the 
petals of the flowers, the ruddle on the sheep, the pores of 
the flesh, the reflection of the face in the glass and the form 
in the water ; therefore Bullfrog, who thinks he had better 
paint and be a brother too, perches himself on the topmost 
peak of the easel, and begins to swell and croak for brother- 
hood. " Let us have the B.« B. B., the Beauty in Bricks 
Brotherhood," says Bullfrog. No more aerial perspective, no 
more middle distance, no more drawing from the antique, no 
more classical landscape ; have we not the bricks in the work- 
house-wall opposite, to study from ? Are they not real ? Go 
for reality. Go for a basket of sprats with every osier in the 
basket and every scale on the sprats, because the basket is a 
basket, and the sprats are sprats. Go for bad drawing, 
because you cannot draw ; for grimy colour, because a factory 
chimney is grimy ; for violently inharmonious colour, because 
a yellow bonnet with scarlet poppies in it, though producing 
a violent and inharmonious effect, is real. Go for ugliness, 
because ugliness is oftentimes terribly real, and because you 
cannot depict beauty. Beality is ugly (sometimes) and must 
be faithfully rendered for the honour and glory of the B. B. B., 
certainly. A laystall is ugly ; a wretched, ragged, untaught, 
street Arab bo} r is ugly ; but you, miserable Bullfrog, can you 
paint, can you even understand, the beauties of the gold and 
silver skies, the leafy woods, the spangled and jewelled fields, 
the sounding sea ? 

It is because I wish the character of Bullfrog to be 
thoroughly known (with a view to his being as thoroughly 
exposed and ultimately demolished) that I now call attention 
from his mischievous imitative foolery to his more mischievous 
imitative roguery. It is the delight of this reptile friend of 
mine to foist delusions on the public mind ; to pass off brain- 
less impostors for transcendant geniuses ; to exaggerate back- 
stairs scanmaggery into grave conspiracies ; to set ignorance 
and impudence and conceit, side by side with wit and learning 
and pathos; to persuade Pennywhistle that the eyes of Europe 



BULLFROG. 471 

are upon him ; to tell Earthworm that forty centuries look 
down upon him from the pyramids ; to elevate the Three 
Tailors of Tooley Street into the people of England. 

Bullfrog must be literary, of course. Here is a brave but 
tender-hearted Christian gentlewoman, who sits down and 
writes us a good book upon a subject that must come home 
to every Christian man and woman in this working world. 
Suppose we call the book the great Patagonian novel. 
Bullfrog is on the alert. He has his pen Teady nibbed, his 
distending apparatus in first-rate working order. He covers 
the dead walls and hoardings with gigantic announcements of 
the forthcoming publication of the great trans-Patagonian 
novel — the Scavenger. A million copies sold in twelve weeks. 
Everybody ought to read the Scavenger. I read it, and don't 
like it. I don't think much of the other great Patagonian 
novel — the Mudlark, though it contains that exquisitely-senti- 
mental lyric, Little Dirty' s Song of the Rushlight. I don't 
care for Gauze and Guilt, Mrs. Modely's great Crim-Tartar 
novel. I yawn over Miss Wiredraw' s Passion and Pantomime, 
ninety-seven thousand four hundred and eighty- six copies of 
which were disposed of, I hear. I fall asleep over Miss Ada 
Johnnycake's Tears, Treacle, and Terror. I find in all these 
great novels little but platitudes, wishy-washy sentiment, con- 
temptible and transparent imitations of great exemplars, and 
endless, drouthy, watery-eyed, maudlin "talkee." I reverence 
real pathos and real sentiment ; but I scorn Bullfrog, hiding 
his fat foolish face in a pocket handkerchief (squinting over 
the corner thereof at the publisher's ledger), and weeping 
sham tears enough for that larger reptile friend of his, the 
crocodile. 

Bullfrog is a noisome pest in every field of literature. 
Young Flackus, for instance (Horace is his Christian name), 
is a poet. He writes the most delicious ditties, the most capti- 
vating sonnets. He flings .flowers of grace, and loveliness, 
and humour, and pathos, around him with the most delight- 
ful caprice, — bless him ! But sometimes he has what the 
French call lubies. He is dark, mysterious, hazy, vehement 
about nothing. He is occasionally nonsensical. He grinds 
his teeth, and is spasmodic. Bullfrog beholds him, and in- 
stantly has the stomach-ache, and foams at the mouth. His 



472 BULLFROG. 

friends Ragg, and Tatters, and Bsevius and Maevius, Lave 
frightful spasms, roll on the hearthrug, and make poetry 
hideous by their howlings. Bad grammar, involved style, 
foggy ideas, incoherent declamation, wordy bombast, pass (at 
least, Bullfrog endeavours to make them pass) current for 
poetry. Thus, too, because Viking, the great Nordt-konig of 
philosophy, is strong and terrible to look upon; because he 
writes with an adamantine stylet upon a plate of seven- times 
tempered steel; because he knows what Thor said and Odin 
thought; because he has so many good words and good thoughts 
at his command that he is occasionally troubled with the em- 
barras de richesses, and becomes complicated ; Bullfrog, who has 
nothing whatever to say, except " Croak," attempts to conceal 
his ignorance by the assuming to be complicated. 

You are not to suppose, Bullfrog, if I only adduce one 
more instance of your ubiquity, that I am at all at a loss 
for subjects on which to vent my just indignation against 
you. There are things I know about' you, my friend, con- 
nected with the Beer question, the general Sunday question, 
the Education question, the Colonisation question, the Prison 
discipline question — things in which you have manifested 
enough rancour, ignorance, and presumption, to bring you a 
thousand times to shame, if shame you had, or knew, or ever 
heard of. 

In common with many other free-born Britons I have 
great liking and respect for public amusements. I like the 
sound, sterling, nervous English drama — the good play, played 
by good actors. But if my friend Charles Bodger chooses to 
get up the second part of Henry the Sixth, at the Royal Pan- 
technicon, with the most gorgeous accessories of scenery, cos- 
tume, and decorative furniture in general, I will not quarrel 
with him, nor will I stand out for the text, the mere text, and 
nothing but the text. I am fpr catholicity, but for toleration 
in catholicity. Rope-dancing is good in its place. Tumbling 
and posturing are good (though painful) in their place. I 
like to see the clown steal sausages at Christmas, but not 
in the awful play scene in Hamlet. Richardson's show is 
admirable ; Horse-riding is capital. Let Bullfrog fool himself 
with fire-eaters, sword-swallowers, ribbon- vomiters, conjurors, 
acrobats, learned pigs, live armadillos, and spotted girls. But 



BULLFROG. 478 

do not let Bullfrog tell me that the drama is to be revived 
through the agency of the live armadillo, or that the only 
hope of the admirers of Shakespeare, rests on the spotted girl. 
Neither shall Bullfrog revive the drama by crystal curtains, 
distributions of soup, coals and counterpanes to the ruffians of 
Low Lane, or presentations of a glass of ale and a sandwich 
to every visitor to the pit, and a boiled leg of mutton and 
trimmings to every occupant of a private box. Herein, as in 
his other presentments, Bullfrog swells and swells exceed- 
ingly ; and when he is swollen to his largest dimensions — 
bursts ! 



THE END. 



BaADEURY AND EVANf. HUNTERS, WUITEFRIAl 



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